FROM ETZEL TO LEHI – A Personal Story

By Moshe and Tova Svorai

(Translation of the first two chapters by Galia Braun, Urbana, Illinois, Summer 2002)

In Soviet Russia

“And the most important thing, and the most important thing is not to be afraid any more.”

The year was 1919.  We were in the Ukraine, in the small town of Domanovka, a mixed Russian-Jewish town of about 200 Jewish families with many children.  In Domanovka we lived in a house make of mud and straw bricks.  The exterior walls of the house were plastered with a kind of mud that hardens in the sun and is then whitewashed.  Such a house was called ‘zemlynka’, very different from the stately house of the town’s butcher, which was built from fired bricks.  The two big rooms of the house were separated by a double wall which functioned, with its hollow space, as a furnace for heating the house in the harsh Russian winters.  This furnace ended with a chimney of the roof.  There wasn’t a Jewish school there, but there were several Heders and Melameds, and what the Melameds didn’t manage to teach, Father, of blessed memory, completed when he came home from touring the area’s villages.

Father was considered to be a farmer.  We had cows, horses and also 16 dessiatines of land (about 80 Dunam ), but Father was mostly a small grain merchant.  He had connections with the local “Paritz”, with our town’s farmers and with farmers from the neighboring villages.

Our town was located not far from the river Bug.  The war years and the following revolution didn’t hurt us much.  The revolution had seemed to be over and some kind of appointed communist committee already ruled the area.  But actually the pogroms continued, carried out either by gangs of the dismantled Petliora regiments or by those who belong to Denikin camp, or by communist groups that also raided the town from time to time, attacking the farmers, demanding food, horses and other supplies.

Father was a farmer of sorts and a grain merchant.  He was an Orthodox Jew and spent every free hour studying the Torah, especially on the Sabbath.  Father often spent the evening with me near the furnace wall that separated the two rooms of our little ‘zemlynka’, teaching me Hebrew grammar or one of the Pentateuch with Rashi Interpretation, and telling me Hasidic Tales.  Father was a ‘Hasid” of the Rabbi of Rachmastrivka, a town somewhat larger than ours, a 5-6 hour drive by cart from our place.  More than once I heard him telling that when my mother, God rest her soul, had difficulty giving birth to me, when she was in labor for several days while I was reluctant to enter the world, a world in which the First World War broke out, Father took the cart and the horses and drove to the Rabbi.  When he reached the Rabbi he was already tired, and he started to cry.  When he told the Rabbi of his anguish the Rabbi held his hand, calmed him down and said, “You can go home.  Everything will end well; everything will be all right.”  And as my father told me, according to his calculations, I was born in that same hour entering the world with loud cries and helped by Jewish midwives and my mother’s friends.

I was the tenth child in the family.  When I was born my two older sisters were already in the US.  They left Russia in 1913.  The child born after them died of scarlet fever at age three; my mother remembered this child until the day she died; she would always tell how nice and beautiful he was.  By the time I was born, at home besides our parents we were five brothers and two sisters.  Little Domanovka lives in my memory to this day, its nearby pine tree forest, its lake in which we bathed in the summer, the “shkatzim” with whom we used to fight from time to time, and the communist teacher who at the beginning of one summer, at school year’s end, after I recited a short poem before the class and the parents, lifted me up and said: “malinki da hodalinki” – “small but accomplished”.  And when the communists demanded that I attend school on Saturdays as well, my father took me out of there and I was taught only by the melamed and my father, of blessed memory, himself.

In town our closest friends were the butcher and his family.  The butcher was also the town Rabbi’s substitute.  They had nine children in their family.  One of them, Nehemiah, was my best friend since childhood.  We called him ‘Nehemchik’.  He was small and thin, his nose sharp and so was his gaze, as if saying, “You’d better watch it!” and he always looked as if he was ready for some mischief.

He was actually my age.  I was just a few months older.  Sometimes when he didn’t listen to me, I would tell him: “You remember that I’m older than you by a few months.”  That reason never convinced him, but for some reason I tended to repeat it in a playful voice.  Contrarily, this playful note sometimes caused him to accept my opinion and suggestion.  Our friendship began in our babyhood.

The butcher was a respected institution in our town.  He was actually the Rabbi and the spiritual leader of the town, even though everyone called him ‘the butcher’, and he was butchering chicken one day in every week.  I don’t know if he was a certified Rabbi, but people turned to him with every difficult question and obeyed his rulings, decisions and advice.

A group of Jews, my father among them, acted as a committee for the community beside the butcher and under his guidance.  There wasn’t a real elected committee in those days, but when someone had to go to the ‘Paritz’, whose extensive estate bordered our town, the ones to go were: the butcher, my father and the miller, a Jew, one of the town’s rich people, owner of a mill and a beautiful red brick house like the butcher’s house.

Father was a scholar {4}, and he, together with the butcher and several other Jews, performed a daily class of Talmud and Mishnahs.  Later, Father would bring this custom with him to the Land of Israel.  With other Jews he would establish a Hevruta {5} for studying Talmud at the big synagogue on Herzl St. in Haifa.  And when they finished a tractate of the Talmud they would make a little celebration and for the occasion mother would cook stuffed fish and compote.  Some would bring beverages, and the group would drink ‘l’haim’, sing Hasidic songs and discuss some Talmudic topic, things that were as a sealed book to me.

From time to time, father served as an arbitrator ruling in all kinds of disputes that rose among our Jewish brothers.  He never received payment for his trouble and time.  And sometimes the gentiles would come to him, too.  Father would always try to reconcile the two sides that came before him but he refused to act as arbiter between gentiles who weren’t familiar to him.  His name was well known among many as an honest and just man who wasn’t afraid to speak his mind even to powerful men.

On occasions father also served as the Jews’ spokesman before the authorities.  He was fluent in Russian and could express himself in the Ukrainian tongue as well.  Sometimes he would go alone to the authorities’ representatives and sometimes in the company of the butcher and another Jew.

Thus it was before and after the communist revolution, and in the days of the pogroms carried out by Denikin and Petliora forces.*

Until the rioters, Denikin and Petliora’s men*, entered town, we had enough to eat and life somehow passed without casualties.  As the rumors and news of their arrival increased – the town leaders were busy conferring how and with what to welcome them.  Some of the young men, my brother among them, prepared themselves for self-defense.  They even secretly gathered some weapons.   Others counseled to prepare food, money and presents for the rioters.  Up until now the town’s residents escaped the pogroms and the rioters – probably thanks to all those ‘gifts’ which had been passed to the rioters in order that they would skip our town and wouldn’t come.  Some gentiles were also afraid of the rioters, and they too contributed equipment, horses and food in order to keep the rioters out of town.

One of the gentile farmers, a ‘Kulak’, meaning one of the wealthy gentiles in town, refused to participate in the ‘contribution’ that was enforced on the town by the rioters’ emissaries.  When the rioters’ leaders heard of it they decided to punish him as a warning to others.  They came to town, caught the recalcitrant ‘kulak’, hanged him in the town’s square and then burned his corpse.  After this there weren’t any similar incidents.  And it urged all the residents, Jews and gentiles alike, to do everything to prevent the rioters from approaching the town.  And so, when the rumors reached us that the rioters were getting near us and had already destroyed this nearby village and burned that neighboring village, at home the actual preparation for escape from there as soon as possible began.

As a small grain merchant, Father had connections among farmers in the area.  He also had special connections with Russian farmers who were “Sabbath observers’ – ‘Sabotniks’.**  Father arranged with one of those farmers for us to take shelter in his house in times of need.  And when we learned that the rioters were near and getting ready to ‘camp’ in town, Father went to this Sabotnik to inform him of our arrival.  Immediately the gentile provided us with a big room and Father waited there for our arrival.  We were about to leave town secretly in a sleigh belonging to another gentile resident of the town.  Fear of the rioters was terrible.  The memory of the ‘trial’ performed by a group of rioters on this ‘kulak’, one of the wealthy gentiles in town, his hanging and the burning of his corpse, was fresh, alive and terrifying.  The smell of burning flesh that penetrated the whole village cast such terror that it is hard to describe.  Even talking about it was frightening.  Children my age who heard what happened and remembered the smell of burning flesh were tormented by this nightmare for a long time, days and nights.  So, half of the town’s population, mainly women and children, left it in a single night.  They spread among the gentiles in the surrounding villages.  The rumor was that one of the battalions which was about to pass through town was headed by Petliora himself, or maybe Denikin, and that this battalion was leaving fire and destruction in its path.

At our place, the older brothers planned to stay home and protect it if possible, mainly against the town’s farmers, since against Petliora himself there was nothing that those few could do.  My brothers weren’t the only ones who stayed.  Many other young men remained in town, too, while women and children tried to get away and hide.  Those who stayed were in fact almost weaponless.

The town was immersed in the harsh Russian winter.  Everything was covered in snow.  It was actually blinding, even at night.  We gathered a few possessions and some food into the sleigh that was standing near the house.  Mother took care of everything, putting warm clothes on us, whatever she could put her hands on, garment over garment.  No one knew what would happen on the way.  The town was seemingly asleep, but it was common knowledge that we were not the only ones who were trying to escape for fear of the approaching rioters.  Mother spoke in Ukrainian with the farmer, the owner of the sleigh, and he promised that everything would be all right.  Present were Mother, my two sisters, one of my brothers – the younger among them – and I, the youngest of the bunch.  The farmer sat at the front of the sleigh.  Mother sat behind him, and we crowded beside her.  The hour was pretty late, but we were all wide-awake and excited.  The sleigh was open, of course, and when we just started to leave town and approached the near forest we looked like a dark spot moving in a sea of snow.

The sleigh started to glide quickly and we felt the penetrating cold despite all the garments.  The eyes and face stung from the cold.  It seemed that no one noticed us leaving town although we knew that many left.  Some preceded us by a day or two.

We were lucky and it didn’t snow.  The skies were clear and around us were only snow and more snow, as far as the eye could see.  We had passed the last houses of the village, the last tree boulevard near the area hospital and we were now in an infinite space of snow and sky.  Mother told us to cover our eyes completely.  But I, like my brother and sisters, was leaving a small gap in the wool scarf for the eyes, so I would be able to see what was going on around.  We were at the mercy of a farmer-driver to whom Mother spoke in Ukrainian.  Father told her to approach him.  How did he find his way in this snow plain?  No house, no tree, and nothing else as far as the eye could see.

The white snow and the gray sky merged on the horizon.  The sleigh glided quietly.  Only the whisper of friction between sleigh and snow and the stamping sound of the two horses’ hooves was heard in the snow.  My sisters and I huddled like chicks around Mother’s body.  The clothes and blankets protected us from the cold and our eyes peered in the direction toward which we were gliding as though flying in the sleigh.  The horses didn’t have bells.  Only the rustle of sliding on the snow was heard.  Our ears heard it well.  We looked for some object that would serve as a road sign – something that would signal us what place we were approaching – but nothing.  No object distinguished itself above the infinite surface of snow.  We glided in this way in the sleigh for quite a long time.  How long?  It’s hard for me to evaluate.  Perhaps because of the fear in our heart and fearing the unknown inside this sea of snow, it seemed to us that too much time had passed and that there was no sign of the houses of the village that was our destination.  Fear crept into our hearts that maybe we were only driving in circles and weren’t making any progress; after all, the view had not changed since we left the forest near Domanovka.  From time to time Mother tired to make the gentile talk for fear that he would fall asleep or lose his way; we heard him pacifying her.  It seems as if he was saying that we had already covered half the distance.  Mother told us everything was all right, and that in a little while this trip would end, and we stared at this blinding plain hoping to notice something after all.  I had very much loved the drives in the sleigh in the wintry sun, but not this drive – this crazy and very terrifying drive.  I will never forget it.

At last the gentile-farmer noticed something.  At least the horses’ gallop slowed a little.  The gentile sounded as if he were telling Mother something.  We saw that Mother was looking to our left, and we did the same.  A small black spot was seen on the horizon.  Was this the edge of the village toward which we were traveling?  The spot looked far to us, far on the horizon, as if left of our traveling route.  But the length of time in which we were supposed to pass those twenty ‘verstas’ hadn’t ended yet.  In the gentile’s opinion as well, we were still far from the village.  So, what was that object, that black spot toward which we approached and whose movement we felt?  This object seemed to grow as we approached it.  And maybe this object itself approached us?  Apprehension and fear awakened in the heart.  Maybe it was the same group of rioters from which we ran away and left town?  Could it have been men on horses, crowded together to look like a huge object that got wider as we approached it?  Our horses slowed their speed more and more as if the gentile was frightened.  Terror froze us.  Mother stood up and whispered with the gentile.  The gentile soothed her.  He also tried to spur the horses, to keep them running fast.  Mother kept asking him: “Well? What is it?”  The object was still far from us but it moved and it was unknown, and the unknown threatened and frightened.

Suddenly the sleigh almost stopped.  All of us were quiet and we tried to penetrate and decipher the unknown with our eyes.  To this day I relive this experience from time to time.  Was it a dark forest with moving treetops?  Was it the rioters’ battalion?  The driver also stood staring and amazed.  Truly he had nothing to fear.  The rioters surely wouldn’t hurt him.  This was how I, the child, reasoned, but surely they would hurt us, the Jews - what would become of us?  Could it be that unintentionally he was leading us to the same trap from which we were trying to escape?

We stood and waited.  What were we waiting for?  Would it not have been better to run in the opposite direction?  The terror drenched me in cold sweat.  I was so scared that I found it difficult to open my mouth.  I attached myself to my mother’s thigh.  I wanted to cry, but I was afraid to open my mouth.

A cold wind began to blow.  It increased the cold and penetrated even the warm clothes.  Was it possible that the movement of the still distant and dark object was not real at all?  Could it have been only a figure of the imagination – of fear?  Was the gentile-driver prisoner of imagination and fear as well?  He advised mother that we should proceed very slowly.  If it was the rioters’ battalion, we wouldn’t be able to escape it anyway.  And if it wasn’t, after all, we weren’t far from the village, the village of refuge.  At the time I heard only fragments of speech that I didn’t understand.  Later, the family members repeated that story many times, and the matter has been well engraved in my childhood memory.

Mother clutched me to her body tightly.  We were all one lump of bodies and souls quivering from fear.  The gentile started driving the sleigh anew.  The sky seemed to clear a little, and as we got closer to this mysterious object which without doubt was situated near trees and forest, it became clear that these were not riders and that there were no horses.  After a few more minutes of driving in the sleigh the gentile said to Mother with stifled laughter, “It’s a windmill … it’s only a windmill whose huge vanes are moving, and it is surrounded by trees covered with snow”.

The gentile chuckled and swore colorful oaths.  “What nonsense”, he said to Mother.  The fear somehow evaporated.  Mother sat collapsed on her seat and tried to encircle us with her hands.  WE gathered and crowded around her again.  Mother wanted to feel us and be assured that we were really beside her, and we wanted to feel her.  I held her with all my strength.  The fear and the tension were almost over and I felt how wretched we were, how miserable and wretched we were – running away from town, running away from home, in the snow and the cold, and what frightened us?  A windmill whose vanes twirled!  The gentile laughed, chuckling to himself, and we shivered from fear.  Funny?  No!  Not at all.  Years later, when we talked about it, I felt how much that incident had been insulting and offending.

The taste of that flight haunted me for many years.  Many nights I would wake screaming and see in my dream snow and snow – snow without end.  In later times, in my dream, my mother would soothe me and say, “When you will grow up you won’t be afraid any more”.  After some years, when I grew up and remembered the incident, I believed that when I grew more I would know no fear.  Even when I am hunted I will not fear anyone.  I will not fear anything.  I will not turn away from anything.  I will no longer be someone who runs from fear and get scared by movement of a ‘windmill’ whose vane twirls in the heart of an endless snow plain.

We reached the ‘Sabotnik’ village with first light.  It was Friday.  Apparently, our gentile driver knew where he was leading us, without signposts and without road signs or roads.  It might be that we had spent some needless time in the snow plain.  It was an unforgettable experience.  We received the Sabbath without candles and without raisin wine for the Kiddush.  Raisin was the Kiddush wine in all those war years.  We made do with black bread that the farmer’s wife made and boiled eggs and waited for the day when we would be able to return to our town.  The waiting lasted a week.  The next Sabbath we were already home and the family was reunited.  And about that ‘windmill’ and that terrible fear a lot had been said.

Years later, when we broke the ‘restraint’ of the organized ‘Yeshuv’ against the Arab rioters in the Haifa area, I remember red from time to time the experience of escaping Petliora’s rioters or the communists – and I was happy to be in Israel, in my own country and doing something together with others to keep the danger away from my people, my family, my neighborhood.

I don’t run any more and I will never run again.

When groups of Denikin’s or Petliora’s men would come to town, the negotiation with them usually ended by paying ransom with food, horses and different foods according to the size of the population.  In the days of the communist committee’s government on the other hand, the entire property was confiscated.  In this way all the miller’s property was confiscated, including, of course, the mill, because he was considered a ‘capitalist’.  He was considered lucky if they left him his house.

A different wealthy man, ‘capitalist’ in the eyes of the communists, was another Jew, owner of a sawmill.  In the past he had paid the ‘Paritz’ full value for the trees he cut from the nearby forest, but in the eyes of the communist who controlled the local committee he was an ‘exploiter’ who exploited the property of the Russian people and the Russian worker, and so he was condemned and his property would be nationalized, and he himself would be sent somewhere for detention until he would face the trial of the ‘people’.

This communist ‘justice’ caused much agitation among the local Jews, because they saw this ‘communist’ activity as simple anti-Semitism.  The fear that the rest of the Jews’ turn would come after the wealthy people was not unfounded.  So several Jews gathered and came to Father to consult with him and with the kosher butcher about what should be done.  I remember this conference well.  About ten Jews sat in our big room, the living room, and argued endlessly.  Loud voices and shouts were heard as well.  They drank a lot of tea and we, the children, laughed:  “How much tea they are drinking!”

At last it was decided that Father would go and talk with the local communist committee.  He had to go alone, so that it wouldn’t look like a rebellious organization.  Father also knew most of the committee’s members.  They were all, except one outsider, sons of farmers who were his acquaintances.

I didn’t know what had happened exactly, and today I remember only fragments of the matter.  I remember only one thing clearly: After Father left for the meeting with the communist committee he was missing from home for a few days.  Mother cried and ran around between the butcher’s house and other places.  The older brothers disappeared from the house too and hid in different places.  It was feared that they would be arrested.  When we were blessed and Father came home he was broken and exhausted.  He could barely stand.  He coughed a lot expelling phlegm with blood.  Great sadness fell on the house.  Mother made accusations against the butcher and the rest of the Jews who were at our home and sent Father to the communist committee.  “Why didn’t several Jews go?!” – asked-argued Mother.  “Why did they only send him?!  Why didn’t the butcher-Rabbi go?!  Why didn’t they go?!”  Mother argued repeatedly and meant those ten Jews who stayed in our house and argued a lot and drank a lot of tea which Mother served kettle after kettle.

Several days passed and Father didn’t recover despite Mother’s devoted care.  Father was sick.  His temperature had risen and he coughed a lot.  So the town’s doctor was called.  He was a famous Russian doctor.  In those days there weren’t any instruments for examination and the town had no lab.  The only instrument the doctor used was the stethoscope.  He would take the stethoscope out of the bag with his bony, gentle, almost transparent hands. Make his examination, and in his quiet and calming voice would present his conclusion and offer the medication.  And sometimes he would even take out of his bag the offered medication.  As for Father, the doctor stated decisively: “The strong unceasing cough together with the bloodstains in the phlegm are not signs of tuberculosis.  There is no danger of contagion.  No.  There is no such danger.  Probably, it’s only a damaged vein that leaks a little during a cough.  And the cough comes from severe cold and it needs to be treated.”  The word ‘tuberculosis’ – the name for a disease without cure in those days – hadn’t been mentioned, but the great fear that maybe this is what Father had weighed down all who were present.  The doctor’s words were very convincing.  People believed his words because he never talked around a subject and never hid anything from his patients.  He was also never wrong.

The doctor ordered Father to lie in bed warmed with hot sand bags, to drink a lot of milk and eat a lot of fat, nutritious food, especially butter and pork.  “Yes,” he said “pork. Only the fat foods because their fat that will collect around the injured vein will stop the bleeding.”

Dreadful problem.  Father was a Jew who adhered most strictly to the commandments, the light as the harsh.  How would he be able to put pork in his mouth?

It seemed that it was then, that for the first time, all the family members found out what happened at the meeting in the communist committee’s house.

The meeting began with good spirits.  Father was remembered well for his handling the negotiation with Denikin’s rioters and how he influenced them to receive food and horses so they wouldn’t riot inside Domanovka.  But when Father started to talk with them about the reason he wanted the meeting they immediately changed their tone.  Father demanded that they stop the persecution of the Jews because the Jews didn’t oppose the communism in the past and didn’t oppose it in the present.  The Jews weren’t ‘Counter-Revolutionist’ as the committee called them, and they weren’t ‘Capitalists’.  Father also demanded that they stop ‘nationalizing’ Jewish property without trial.  Father also argued before them, “Please bring them to justice and try to prove from whom they have taken and from whom they have stolen.  But don’t confiscate according to orders from above.”

When they heard his words they started threatening Father.  They also said clearly “Wait, you just wait.  We will reach you too!”

Father immediately understood that in this way they could find ‘orders from above’ against him, too, and he spread his bony hands before them and told them:

“These hands are clean.  I didn’t take anything from anyone; no money, no goods, and no horses.  Please, let everyone check himself and his actions.  Where is all that you have confiscated from the Jews?”

They didn’t let Father talk any more.  They didn’t allow him to finish the sentence.  With their own hands they took him out of the room and delivered him to some thugs.  These thugs beat him and threw him into a basement.  The basement was filled with water that reached above knee height.  Father was held there for two whole days, while Mother and my older brothers were running all over town trying to find where Father had been taken.  Beaten and battered, Father was forced to stand there in the darkness of the basement all that time.  How did he manage to hold on without collapsing and without losing his consciousness?!  And how did he manage to reach home on his own on his red and swollen feet?!

Since his return we heard him cough and spit blood.  As was mentioned, the doctor demanded, forcefully, that Father eat pork and told him clearly:  “If you don’t do as I tell you, you will die!”

After Father’s return, my older brothers came back home.  The butcher arrived as well.  He too participated in the search for Father.  When he came, the butcher already knew what Father went through and didn’t let him speak lest the effort would harm him.  From Mother the butcher heard about the doctor’s visit and his order regarding the pork.  When the butcher realized that this was a matter of life and death he started to persuade Father to listen to the doctor’s instruction.  Mother, then, set aside serving dishes for Father, so that the rest of the dishes wouldn’t become non-kosher.  Beside that, Mother made cream from our cows’ milk, prepared fresh butter from the cream and baked all kinds of pastries rich with butter.  All the family members took upon themselves to help Father recover.  For example, complete silence would fill the house when Father fell asleep.

Interestingly enough, the persecutions and the confiscations of Jewish property stopped after Father’s return.  The communist committee’s people were probably afraid for their skin.  They were afraid that their superiors would learn about their actions and the whereabouts of the missing property they nationalized and confiscated from Jews and wealthy gentiles.

Father’s recovery took many days.  When the weather improved and summer days arrived I had the opportunity to spend time with Father in the pine tree forest outside town for his recovery.  We would go there every morning.  I would take with me two light blankets, a big jug of boiled milk and a big bag of pastries.  We didn’t walk to the forest.  Father was still forbidden this kind of effort.  I don’t remember how we made our way there.  In the forest we would lie for many hours on the spread out blankets, all in accordance with the doctor’s orders.  Father would tell me to read from the weekly section of the Torah and from Rashi interpretation.  He almost never talked.  Speech was still difficult for him.  I would read and read and when I made a mistake in some word Father would correct me.  We would stay there for a few hours, until noon, and finish almost all the milk and cookies that we had brought.

Those days with Father in the forest were very dear to me.  Every morning I would wait impatiently for going with Father to the forest.  Father had been only mine and I was only his.  We were both alone and no one disturbed us.  No one separated us.  During my reading Father would fall asleep.  At first I would stop my reading so it wouldn’t wake him up.  But the moment I stopped Father would wake up.  So, I learned that in order that Father would continue to sleep and gather strength, I mustn’t stop reading, and then he would recover in no time.  The cough would stop and we would have a healthy father again.

After Father recovered from his illness, the butcher was a frequent visitor in our home again, and the relationship between the families returned to what it used to be.  My mother and the butcher’s wife also grew close again.  For some time there was some kind of coordination between them in the matter of births.  My mother brought ten children into this world, including one that died of scarlet fever when he was three, and the butcher’s wife brought into this world nine or ten children as well.  Nehemchik and I were the last in the families’ birth order.  We both studied together in the Heder with the same Melamed, and we were also in the same class at the general public school for the few years we were there.

Nehemchik was very mischievous.  He was full of contrivances and invented all kinds of games, ways to provoke his elder sisters, to pull pranks, to create tension and have fun.  I wasn’t far behind him.  But my face always gave me away after I pulled some prank; Nehemchik’s face, on the other hand, never gave him away.  After playing and running around my face would get red like a beet and on Nehemchik’s face you couldn’t see even a trace of blush.  This characteristic helped him more than once to avoid reprimand or punishment for a prank he pulled.  I wasn’t so lucky.  When Mother or Father looked at my face, they knew immediately if I had done some mischief.

In the last years before we immigrated to the Land of Israel the two families, our family and the butcher’s family, grew closer, especially the relationship between the young members of the families.

When my brother Gedalia left town in 1920 in order to cross the border illegally to Romania and continue from there to America, to my older sisters who lived there since 1913, the butcher’s elder son left with him.  I don’t remember the details recounted at home at the time about this affair, about crossing the border illegally and obtaining the forged and the kosher documents.  But I remember that the butcher’s son didn’t succeed.  He was caught and returned to town after the Russian authorities punished him.

At that time my brother, Yitzchak, bought two horses for our farm.  One of the pair was a gray mare with a big white spot on her head, a very tall mare with a long body.  I was about eight and a half and knew much about the character of each horse.  And naturally, I also rode the horses, without saddle and without blanket or sack, the way the farmers’ children, the ‘shkatzim’ did.  I sometimes took care of the horses as well, feeding them, filling their water trough and cleaning them.

Not until I knew the horse well, and more than that, not until the horse knew me – would I try to mount and ride him.  I wasn’t allowed either.  Especially my big brother insisted upon it.  But once the horse got used to me, I was allowed to mount him from the trough near him and ride him inside our big yard.  I even tried once to ride a horse between the fruit trees we had at the corner of the yard, and I scratched my hand and face on the branches of the trees.

After I got to know our new mare well, and especially after she got used to me, after she knew me and liked me to pet her head and back – I  mounted and rode her in our yard.  I didn’t dare sit on her inside the stable, because she was so tall she almost reached the stable’s lintel; the space between her back and the stable’s lintel was only a hand length.

This mare was my ‘great love’.  It was as if she felt it when I got near her and she would rub her head on me.  And I always came near her with something tasty for her: cabbage or a beet or a piece of sugar I stole from the table, a very expensive thing in Russia in those days.  The sugar was sold in big lumps shaped like a cone.  More than once Mother sent me to break such a sugar cone to pieces with special chrome coated hammer.  I would break the cone on a piece of white cloth and all the sugar chips would be later collected from it.  The mare very much enjoyed the sugar I put in her mouth, and the cabbage or beet, too.

One day, after I had already gained the mare’s confidence and after I had ridden her a few times inside the yard, while my big brother was away from home and Mother and Father didn’t notice, I left quietly, without saying anything, for the butcher’s house, to show my friend Nehemchik what a wonderful mare we had.  In order to reach the butcher’s house I had to cross and pass the whole market, the town’s center, the town’s main well and the synagogue because the butcher’s house was in the town’s center, not far from the big synagogue.  It was a little after lunch, on a beautiful, and not very warm day.  I knew that Nehemchik was home, and I was sure he would be happy to see me ride that huge mare.

I don’t remember if the butcher’s family had horses or a farm.  We had a farm.  The family hadn’t always worked the farm but near the house there were always a lot of chickens, a few milking cows and a few horses.

When I reached the butcher’s house Nehemchik was in the yard fixing his little cart.  Nehemchik used to drag this cart up the street and then roll in it down the incline to the main well, drag it up again … and so forth.  When Nehemchik saw me enter the yard riding on the mare’s back – his eyes glued to us.  Despite his perpetual poker face, I saw how much the mare impressed him.  His big (eyes) stretched almost to the brim of the cap on his head, and one exclamation left his mouth, an unusually long exclamation: ‘hoo---‘.  And then he exclaimed: “What a mare!  What length!”

I dismounted and tied the mare to a post near the yard’s stonewall.  Nehemchik slowly circled the mare while keeping a safe distance, surveying, inspecting and examining.  He didn’t hold back his words of admiration and I enjoyed very much hearing them and added just a word or two: “I told you so!  I told you she is great!”

After a few minutes he turned to me, all begging and pleading:  “Moshe, give me a ride”.  I wasn’t surprised by the request.  I knew it was coming. And I already had a ready answer, a definite negative answer; after all, the mare didn’t know him.  And my brother Yitzchak – he would kill me.  And if, God forbid, he would fall from the mare, from such height, why, I would be the only one to blame.  And I, after all, took the mare without the knowledge or permission of my parents.

I already began to regret this ride to the butcher’s house.  “Nehemchik,” I said, “after all, this mare doesn’t know you.  She will drop you in the same way she shakes off the flies that sit on her”.  But the request came back with ample reasons of his own: “Why, you know I am an excellent rider … and I already petted her and she let me … and I’ll bring her a piece of sugar … and I’ll bring her a carrot … and I’ll bring her bread and whatever she wants …”

I was repeating my reasons and even mounting the mare to emphasize that I was not about to change my mind.  I was trying to calm him down because I could see that he was very angry in light of my refusal, but without any success.  I leaned forward on the mare’s back for a few moments, and didn’t notice that in those minutes Nehemchik managed to pick up some whip or a thin stick and whip the mare’s flank with all his strength.  The mare all at once lifted her long legs in a sudden leap and broke into a mad gallop, crossing the town’s center.  People who were in her way were jumping aside in fright as she galloped straight to our home.

To this day I don’t understand how I wasn’t thrown from the mare’s back when she suddenly leaped from the butcher’s yard following Nehemchik’s whipping.  To this day I don’t know what I clung to with my hands and feet, because there was no saddle on the mare’s back.  I probably clung to her body with my feet and with my hands caught the mane on her long neck.  Most likely, I didn’t ride upright again and reached home leaning on her back.

Our yard gate was open.  Mother sat in the shade of a tree doing something with her hands.  I saw Father sitting in the big hallway near a table reading some kind of big book, probably tractate of the Talmud.  It was less than 50 meters from the gate to the stable.  I knew that if I didn’t succeed in getting off the mare before she reached the stable I would be lost, because the space between the mare’s back and the stable’s lintel was just a hand width.  I didn’t think twice and while holding the mare’s mane with my hands, I threw myself down before her front legs, dangling from her huge neck.  I was falling down and she, with all four legs, was jumping over me without touching me.

Mother and Father heard the noise of the running mare’s hooves; they lifted their eyes to me and got very scared.  Father clapped his hands in astonishment and Mother – the practical woman in our house – rose quickly and ran towards me to pick me up.  I heard neither yells nor rebukes.   Mother picked me up, stroked my head and asked, “What happened?” and I, stunned from fright, didn’t answer.  I barely got my breath back.  Mother told me later that I was white as a sheet; Father also spared me his rebukes when he saw my face.  He just asked and interrogated me ceaselessly even though he didn’t get any answers from me.  At last, in Mother’s arms, I calmed down a little and bit-by-bit told my parents everything.  They didn’t believe me at first and thought that I caused the mare to gallop intentionally, but at last they were convinced that my story about Nehemchik whipping the mare and causing her to leap was true.  In any case, a long time passed before they let me get on the mare again.

And what of my friendship with Nehemchik?  It continued as before.

On hot summer days, in the afternoon, the town’s youths often bathed in the lake outside town.  We too, Nehemchik and I, often spent time there, to swim, to have fun, to be mischievous and to go wild, inside the water and out of it.  More than once he tried to push my head under the water and I tried to push his.  The submerged head would stay under the water until it had no breath and then would pop out for air.

We left the town of Domanovka in the month of Av in the year Tarpad (1924).  Preparing for the trip took a long time.  Some items were packed for use on the way and some weren’t packed for use on the way.  The things were packed in suitcases – used, of course.  Bedding and clothing were packed and even books that the family found difficult to give up.  The grammar book that Father bought so that we’d learn Hebrew grammar was packed also.  I still have that book today, and it had many inscriptions and many notes.  A few volumes of history books in Hebrew were packed as well.  I don’t know who wrote the books but they are kept with me still.

And thus the packages multiplied and the furniture slowly disappeared.  Some were given to relatives and some to friends.  The articles of furniture were simple and used.  There was nothing to sell and no one to sell it to.  And in the last days our living room was practically a warehouse.  Packages above packages and Nehemchik and me running between them, climbing on them, playing hide and seek around them and getting reprimanded from every side.

On our last evening in town everyone already knew that we were leaving the next day.  The endless parting began.  People were coming, entering the house, sitting for a while, sometimes shedding a tear, speaking fond words for our good luck and congratulating us and themselves: if only they would be able to travel, too.  These were leaving and others were coming. The refreshments Mother prepared didn’t leave the table.

The main beneficiaries of all the clamor and din were the children.  My sister Chaia, two years older than I, didn’t play with us anymore, but I, Nehemchik and his sister Hasya, a pale thin girl older than me by few months, were running around, playing and being noisy and the house was full with us.

Not all the family members were present.  Yitzchak, my big brother, went to say goodbye to his acquaintances in town.  My sister Dina went with him.  Father was missing too.  He wasn’t back from the synagogue yet.  He was praying the evening prayer there for the last time in town.  This was also a chance to say goodbye to those from town who came to pray in the synagogue on workdays too.  My brother Binyamin and my sister Chaia were here.  They helped Mother.

The evening was getting darker and the number of people at the house grew.  And so were the conversations between them and the family members.  And we, the small ones, kept doing our thing: playing and running wild around the pile of packages and on it.

The butcher and his wife arrived as well.  When they came Nehemchik calmed down a little and for a few moments stood beside them, but after a short while we left the house together and played in the yard. Something in the yard scared us, I don’t remember what, but we both ran away from there, we burst into the house and jumped on the pile of packages.  There we sat quietly holding hands.  The day after, we were told that we were found on the pile of packages embracing and asleep.

In the morning a big cart arrived with two big horses hitched to it, to take our baggage and us to Golta – a city situated on both sides of the river Bug.  It had a train station.

The parting in the morning was difficult.  The tough, reserved Nehemchik started yelling that he wanted to go too.  The butcher, his father, somehow calmed him down.  A stifled weeping of women was heard.  Mother didn’t cry, but sobs escaped the Butcher wife’s lips.

My older brother, Israel, who was staying because he believed that he could live in Russia even under Communism, was beside us trying to help us arrange the packages and decide who would sit where because we were about to be jolted for several hours in the cart until we reached Golta.  His wife Katya and his little son Ephraim who was five years old, were waiting for us in Golta.  How I loved that little boy.  After all, I am his uncle!  Is it a small thing?

My brother Israel believed that being an excellent mechanic and having the knowledge needed to operate the mill that he built with his own hands, the communist authorities would leave the mill in his hands.  His mistake was made clear even before we left Russia.  The whole mill was confiscated. They barely let him remain the operator of the mill since there was no one else to do it.

My brother Israel lived then in Golta or in its twin city, Bogopol.  That was our destination.  From there the train would lead us to Moscow and in the American consulate there we would receive the papers that would enable us to enter the United States, to my brother and sisters.  When would that be?  How long would we be on the way?  All those concerns were not mine but the grownups’.

In Our Patrimony

Here in the precious forefathers’ land

All hopes would be realized …

We immigrated to Israel in the month of Av in the year Tarpa (1925).  I was about eleven.  My brother Gedalia, of blessed memory, who escaped Russia to America, where our sisters lived since 1913, tried to bring us there, to the United States.  He sent to us ‘demands’ documents for the family reunification.  We sold and disposed of all our property and set out: Father, Mother, two daughters and three sons, with our packages - on the way.

The journey from Domanovka to Moscow, by cart and train, lasted three days and three nights.  My brother, Israel, who was already married and father of a child didn’t come with us.  He remained in Russia.  He still believed that it was possible to get along with the Communists.  He paid for it dearly.

In those few years Russia was in an interim state.  It was before the communist government managed to gain control over the farmers who were the majority of the population.  And the authorities still allowed a little private enterprise.  This period was called the ‘NEP’.  The government nationalized two mills owned by my brother Israel, and he was given the right to lease those same two mills and operate them himself.  This enticement was the reason he stayed in Russia, but when Stalin took over the party and became Russia’s ruler my brother, along with millions of others, was sent to forced labor in Siberia for the crime of being a ‘bourgeois’, a ‘workers exploiter’.  Only with great difficulty, in a state of illness unto death and hopelessness, was he allowed, for some reason (by virtue of the forefathers? by heaven’s mercy?), to return from Siberia and escape death.

In Moscow we were required to present ourselves in the American consulate.  They needed to check the family’s health and confirm the validity of the ‘demands’ documents that my older brother Gedalia had sent us from the US.  Father was afraid that after the difficult journey, the examining doctor would find some weakness in us.  For that reason he postponed our visit to the consulate for a few days, until we recuperated from our exhaustion.  And to our great surprise, when we reached the consulate, Father was told that the immigration quota from Russia to America was full and there was no room for additional immigrants.

We had sold or given away all we had.  What were we going to do now?  We stayed at the hotel for a short time until we managed to contact my brother Gedalia in America.  He suggested that we should not wait and that we should leave communist Russia for Eretz-Israel.  When they were still in Russia, Gedalia and Yitzchak, the eldest brothers, were members of the Zionist association ‘Hachalutz’ (the Pioneer).  And Gedalia, right after he illegally crossed the Russian-Rumanian border, sent home a letter containing a small passport photograph.  On its back he wrote: “If I forget thee O Jerusalem let my right hand forget her cunning”.  And in the long letter he sent from America to Russia, he wrote to us, “Don’t linger in Russia.  Go to Eretz-Israel.  In any event I will not stay here long and I will join you.  My brother Yitzchak wants to go there as well.  Mainly, prepare yourselves for the way.” 

I remember to this day my father’s reaction upon reading the letter.  Father read the letter again and told my mother, “Do you hear Shaindel, he writes to us again, ‘If I forget thee O Jerusalem let my right hand forget her cunning’.  He wants us to go to Eretz-Israel.  He will come there as well.”  And he burst into tears from the excitement.  And Mother, too, took out a handkerchief and turned to the corner of the room to wipe a tear.  She didn’t want to be seen in her weakness, as it were, crying and sentimental.

In America, Gedalia inquired what were the possibilities of entering Eretz-Israel at that time, and he found that the easiest and quickest way to accomplish this task was to deposit a sum of five hundred pounds in an Eretz-Israeli bank under my father’s name.  Then my father would be considered a ‘capital owner’ who is permitted to receive a ‘capital owner’s type certificate (License for Aliya).  But this was not a simple thing.  Five hundred pounds in those days, for a young man who had just arrived in the United States was no small matter.  But with help from the sisters, who were already married, and friends, and by taking on commitments, Gedalia obtained this sum and deposited it in Eretz-Israel.  In the meantime we returned from Moscow to Golta on the Bug – (today this town is called Pervomaisk, named for May first, the communist holiday).  We stayed there for about a year until the documents arrived, and until passports were bought for the whole family, for the full price.  And we were thus fortunate to leave Russia on our way to Eretz-Israel on the ship “Vladimir Ilyich Lenin” with two hundred and fifty other Jews.  It was the last big ship to leave Russia on the way to Eretz-Israel.

In the month of Av we disembarked on Jaffa’s shore.  The ship lay at sea far from shore.  We climbed down from it on a swinging ladder to a boat that rose and fell.  It was commanded by an Arab sailor wearing balloon-like sharwal pants.  He was catching those who disembarked and actually throwing them to the boat’s belly.  The red tarbooshes, the throaty Arabic language, the loud shouts, the swinging and swaying of the boat – it was all strange, unexpected and frightening.  The air filled with women and children’s shouts of fear, and everything was fast and dizzying.  No one fell down to kiss the holy ground, but everyone was gripped by excitement.  Happiness and fear surged together.  The heart, the body, the whole Jewish Agency, or the Zionist Federation – no one heard of them and no one saw their representatives when the ship arrived.  A grave faced Jew ran around there giving orders to the clerks, Arabs most of them, the minority Jewish.  The clerks checked the documents, the passports and the ages of the children and the adults again and again.  They checked everything thoroughly, as if some demon was prodding them saying, “Search and search well, little clerk, until you will find some fault.”

As to this high-ranking Jewish clerk – I think his name was Haimson – if I say he was a Jew-hater it would be an understatement.  Even then, in 1925, he made every effort to make it difficult for the Jews to enter the country.  And after a time satiric songs were sung about him by the ‘Hamatateh’ and ‘Hakumkum’ theater companies (the “Broom and the “Kettle” – two satirical theaters).  We figured out his character when he harassed my brother Yitzchak.

Our family left Russia and arrived in this country with two passports, one for Father and one for Mother.  Each of the children was added to one of these two passports. Yitzchak was the eldest among us.  He was born in 1904.  In 1925 he was twenty one years old – namely, over eighteen, and therefore an adult who must have his own passport and present his own five hundred pounds to be granted an Aliya license as a capital owner.  To avoid all that, in Russia, Yitzchak was issued a document stating that he was seventeen and a half years old, and consequently the rest of the children’s ages were reduced by three or four years.  This was done to avoid the need for another passport which cost about 60 pounds in Russia in those days.  It also saved us the need for an additional deposit of five hundred pounds for an Aliya license that we couldn’t afford.  After all, the first sum of five hundred pounds my brother Gedalia managed to gather only with extraordinary effort, with the sister’s help and with the help of friends.

All this didn’t sit well with Haimson, and he didn’t let my brother disembark.  In the meantime we were put in ‘Quarantine’ – that is: transit camp for the purpose of receiving vaccines and the medical exam, so we wouldn’t, God forbid, bring contagious diseases into the country.  Father made a Herculean effort to meet with Haimson, who was sitting on the ship’s deck in the company of his clerks, and the ship raised anchor and sailed to Haifa.

To this day I don’t know how Father managed to leave camp the day after and go to Haifa.  All I know is that Father stayed one night in camp, and the day after he went to Haifa.  There, aided by the community council or a similar institution’s influence, he managed to release my brother from Haimson’s hands.  We were relieved.  Two hundred and fifty Jews were on that ship which was, to the best of my knowledge, the last one to arrive from Russia to this country’s shore with such a large number of Jews onboard.  Only dozens arrived on board the next ships, and after a time, the Aliya from Russia stopped completely.

We managed to leave Russia thanks to the wisdom and the tireless efforts of my brother Gedalia. 

Later, when I was held in Acre fortress as a prisoner of the British government, against whom my friends and I fought, my two eldest sisters arrived for a visit.  I knew them only from photos, because they left home before I was born.  Each sister came, of course, to Acre fortress to visit me, every woman in her turn.  And my sister stood, with teary eyes, on the concrete platform near the visitor’s wall, before a double barbed wire fence.  I stood before her and the fence separated us.  Behind me stretched the big courtyard of Acre fortress.  I wore brown prisoner garb, although ironed (the ‘iron’ was the mattress I slept on) and scrupulously clean.  And I stood and smiled … and my sister Esther asked me, after she calmed down a little, why I smiled.  And I answered her in broken Yiddish and bad English:

“I am happy to see you here.  I am happy that you and Sarah and Gedalia gave me the opportunity to do something for the liberation of my country.  Were it not for Gedalia, who directed our departure from Russia toward Eretz-Israel, who knows where I would be in 1946?” 

And to this day, more than sixty years after we came to this country, Israel, every time I remember Gedalia’s letter to my parents, with the suggestion-request in it, “Leave Russia quickly and go to Eretz-Israel,” I bless him in my heart and thank God who gave him the brain and the resourcefulness to influence my father, of blessed memory, to take advantage of this short-termed opportunity, escape Russia and come to Israel. 

And to this day, when I remember my brother Gedalia I am grateful to him, even though he himself didn’t fulfill the vow and stayed there, in America, and came to this country only for short visits.  There was always some reason for postponing the Aliya.  And even though I complained to him about it, I will forever be grateful to him for granting me the opportunity to grow up in this country, to fight for it, to build a home in it and to see it in its war and sovereignty – in the establishment of its independence.

But we were still on our first night in the country, on the Jaffa coast, in quarantine.  It was divided into two camps: one for women and one for men.  Two high barbed wire fences positioned two meters apart divided the two camps.  We could speak with Mother and the sisters only in shouts.  We all went through the showers and the clothing disinfection.  The smell of the Carvol (there was no DDT at the time) hit our nose and the noise – our ears.  At last night arrived.  We were inside shacks, not far from the sea, and the sound of the waves hummed in our ears.  The camp was built on sandy ground, and walking on it was difficult.  The light was weak.  Due to the excitement we had that day, the fatigue, the hunger and thirst – I fell asleep the moment I got into bed.  Suddenly, still asleep, I heard shouts and screams.  At first I thought it was a bad dream, but very quickly it became clear that it was real.

The loud screams came from the women’s shacks.  The lighting in the camp was very weak: pale light of electric lamp that illuminated only its close surroundings.  Several men, my father among them, ran toward the women’s camp, toward the shack from which the screams and the cries for help came.  Apparently they didn’t notice the fence and the barbed wire while running and some of them were scratched and injured.  Screams again, from this side, too, curses in Russian, shouts in Yiddish and even cries in Hebrew, and panic and commotion all around.  The women shouted and said that Arabs tried to invade their shacks.  Women from the neighboring shack started to scream as well. The camp’s clerks – Arabs most of them – claimed that it was only the women’s imagination.  The Jew among them swore in Yiddish ‘in all that is holy’ that the women’s accusations were baseless.  We of course believed the women.  Could that Jewish clerk really know what his Arab friends did? And the arguments with the clerks continued.  The men wanted to stand guard at the entrances to the women’s shacks and they were not permitted.  At last a superior clerk arrived from somewhere and he promised to investigate and punish, if the need arose.  The tempers slowly calmed, a frightening welcome on the first night in Eretz-Israel. 

Was it an indication for the days to come?

Was it just lust or maybe some means of frightening the Jewish immigrants? 

Even here would we know no rest from the pogroms?

                        *                      *                      *

Footnotes:

*Etzel – Initials of Irgun Zeva’i Le’umi – National Military Organization

*Lehi – Initials of Lohamei Herut Yisrael – Fighter for the Freedom of Israel

*1 dessiatine = 2.7 acres; 1 acre = 0.22 Dunam

*Denikin – a Russian commander in the First World War and the military commander of the ‘White’ movement that fought the Red Army.  His soldiers carried out vicious pogroms among the Jews.

*Petliora – A Ukrainian statesman, War Minister in the Ukrainian government (1917).  In 1919 he was the supreme commander of the Ukrainian army and fought both the Red Army and Denikin’s White Army, both of which tried to take over Ukraine.  His army lost to the Red Army and his soldiers took revenge on the Jews.  For six weeks they carried out mass slaughter of the Jews.  Petliora didn’t lift a finger to save them.  In 1926 Shalom Schwarzbard killed him in Paris, thus taking revenge for his family and his Jewish people.  A French court tried him and has acquitted him out of understanding for his motives.

*Sabotniks – members of a Russian cult who observed the Sabbath