חלק 3

מתוך הספר "קדושי שבע קהילות"

תקציר באנגלית

Printing from the book

The martyrs of the seven communities

The history of the Klein family

And These Shall Be Blessed…

“I will open for you the windows of heaven and pur out for you blessings immeasurable”

(Malachi 3:10)

An Eternal Flame and Sacred Tombstone to the Martyrs of the Seven Communities

Of

Dolha, Kusnica, Zadne,

Kerecke, Bereznik, Lisicovo,

Sucha-Bronka

Who were killed, murdered and cremated for sanctifying the Holy Name

By the Nazis, may their name be blotted out, in the year one thousand nine hundred and forty-four. May the Lord grand His mercy and eternal rest to the pure and innocent souls and avenge the spilled blood of His servants.

A Community That Once Was:

Kerecke

I remember Kerecke. A village of verdant fields. When gazing from the mountain that towered over the village, I could see a beautiful plain running alongside the river, the winding road of the village running through it. The homes of the Jewes were situated in the village center. By standing on the mountain, I could see the fields in a blaze of colours, the dark green of the potato fields, the light green of the cornfields with bright golden sunflowers strewn all around. The plots were generally of a uniform size… they created a breathtaking picutre. The eye could never drink in enough.

Approximately fifty-five Jewish families lived in Kerecke before the war. Everybody knew everybody. As in other villages of the region Jews made their living from commerce, farming and the lumber trade. Jews played an important role in the economy. They supplied the villages with various necessities and also traded in the lumber from the nearby forests. Kerecke boasted a shoe store belonging to a famous Czech concern and the Ruthenian residents from the surrounding area were wont to make their purchases in the village. This brought prosperity to not a few Jewish shops.

Village Life

Kerecke – How do I remember you?

A village surrounded by mountains, and the Borzshave River cutting through the valley. The roar of the waters growing louder towards evening, when the daily activity comes to a halt…

But not all memories of childhood in Kerecke are as lyrical, and the aouthor of these lies has other, different memories as well. His family enjoyed good relations with the gentile neighbours – farmers just as they – but the Jewish children did not always have an easy time of it. With their long sidelocks and hats, they immediately stood out from the rest. Sometimes the village urchins taunted them with shouts of “Jew, go to Palastive!”. At other times they threw stones of set their dogs at their heels.

But I knew that I had to put on a brave face and not be afraid, not of the dogs and not of the children. Not to show them that I was scared. To suppress the fear and go on my way. It was for just such cases as these that the Jewish children invented special charms for warding off fear, such as: “Hind, hind, ich bin yakovs kind” (“Dog, dog, I am the son of Jacob”).

*

The synagogue served as a community center for young and old. In addition to the Talmud lessons which were held after prayers, issues of community interest were also hammered out in the synagogue. It was there that the Head of the community elected, and there that the teachers were engaged. And where was the baking of matzos organized, if not in the synagogue? During the years before deportation the synagogue underwent renovation and expansion. The building activity was overseen by Reb Sender Roseman, at that time the elected Head of the Community. One survivor recalls fond memories of the synagogue during the dark times before the war:

The synagogue in which we prayed every morning and night only strenghened our faith and our hope that we would overcome everything this time as well. As a child, I felt in the synagogue as though in a “city of refuge”. I loved the synagogue, I felt safe there. No non-Jew ever entered. Only on the Czech Day of Independence, when the congregation recited the prayer for the national welfare would the village elders and Chief o Police be invited to hear.

Rabbi Hanokh Teitelbaoum

Scion to a renowned Chasidic family, Rabbi Hanokh Teitelbaum made his home amongst the Jews of Kerecke and the village became a great center of Chasidism. Ardent disciples from near and far streamed towards his court for word had gone forth of the rebbe’s special powers. Yet prior to settling in Kerecke not a few of the local Jews worried lest they find themselves unable to provide sustinence for the rebbe and his court. The Rabbi from Belz, however, put their worries to rest, assuring them that “the thousands of Chasidim who streamed to this court would bring blessing to the village altogether”. And such indeed was the case.

The rabbi maintained his own yeshiva, and with every new term of study the village sprang into life as some fifty or sixty lads made their way to Kerecke. There would be a scrambling in search of places to sleep and families to provide “eating days”. All this quickened the pace of the quiet little town. Old pupils and new, some of them accompanied by their parents, one and all with eyes lifted unto the court of the great rebbe. The local Jews were also much affected by the presence of the tzaddik who had settled amongst them:

We all admired the rabbe, villagers and pupils alike. My father generally prayed in the synagogue… But there were Sabbaths in which he chose to go off and pray in the synagogue of the rabbi. The rabbi’s presence lent sanctity to his place of worship. Once, as a child, I remember going there with father. On the way home he was in the highest of spirits, greatly pleased with the rabbi’s sermon and prayers… despite their limited means, my mother and father, may their memory be blessed, also provided a yeshiva-boy with his meals one day a week. And my mother always strove to feed him well, so that he need not study Torah on an empty stomach.

Growing up in  Kerecke

As in other villages of the region the boys of Kerecke had a busy school day, spending the eanliest hours of the morning in heder before reparting to the government Czech school and from there back to heder. There they would study till the evening prayer of maariv, in winter coming home only after dark. For many years prior to receiving its own structure, the heder was situated in the synagogue courtyard. The synagogue itself was located across from the Police Station. Some Jewish lads also studied in the Russian school, run by a priest who lived in a large house with an apple orchard.

One survivor has left a group portrait of the boys who studied beside him in heder, mentioning their special traits and characteristics: “Mordechai was the leader of the group”, for example, or:

Ari [Aaron] lived in the house next door. We had a cherry tree whose upper branches blossomed on their side. He would always demand partnership in the fruit of the tree but to this I would not agree, conceding only that “the fruit that falls in your yard belongs to you”.

Such was the busy life of a schoolboy. But how about the life of the girls? One survivor provides us with anecdotes of her own girlhood in Kerecke. She studied for eight years in the Czech school and recalls this as a very fine period. Apart, that is, from the time she was punished for speaking Yiddish at recess. Her punishment? Staying after school and writing five hundred times: “In a Czech school one does not speak Yiddish”. On Sundays, when school was out and the boys off studying in heder, the girls would take lessons in Judaism. Very few Jewish girls went on to study in high school, but this particular girl was on of the lucky ones to be accepted. The teacher even managed to secure a stipend for her. Only, since attendance in high school would mean writing on the Sabbath her mother put her foot down and refused. So the thirteen-year old girl was sent off to her cousin to learn sewing instead.

Only, they put me to work at other tasks as well and after three days, my sewing career came to an end. A short while later Mother hired a yeshivah boy to teach me Judaism, and he received food and clean laundry in exchange. Around that time my sister Mireleh made a new dress for my fourteenth birthday and I went over to play with the grandchildren of the old shochet who lived nearby. The shochet asked me: “Who made your dress?” and I answered, “My sister, Mireleh. He said: “Go home and tell her to put some more length on those sleeves”.

The young girls grouped together on Sabbath eves after dinner, chatting the night away “for there was nothing else to do”. On late autumn evenings after the rain and snow had begun to fall and the nights were long and dark, the young girls organized themselves to go off and clean feathers, each time at the home of a different family. “We would sing until late and have fun. Generally the boys also came over and on the way home, we girls romped in the snow and threw snowballs”. Summer memories include going to pick mushrooms and pecans in the forest and keeping an eye out on “uncle’s geese”. Moreover,

After Shavuot, we would go out to the old flour mill. The house had once belonged to my Grandmother and my Grandmother Pearl, for whom I was named. I loved to go up to the house and peek through the small window, for mother had been born in the house…

Passover was the time for receiving new clothes and shoes. But the time that this young girl received shiny, black patent-leather shoes was a memorable occasion indeed. How carefully she placed them by her bed at night, tenderly wrapped in their box!

Sabbath

As for all other Jews of the region, Sabbath was the center of spiritual life for the Jews of Kerecke. To all intents and purposes, Sabbath would begin on Thursday afternoon when such provisions as flour and bread were purchased. On Thursday night the mothers would knead the dough for baking and by the time a lad set off for heder next morning there was already some tasty morsel ready for sampling. Everything that was done on Friday was done for the Sabbath. One man reports that his job had been to shine the family shoes, a grimy job indeed after a week in the fields. Another survivor mentions that as a young girl, she had been the one to take the cholent off to the third meal of Sabbath.

One man caught an inadvertent and very special glimpse of the preparations his mother made for the Sabbath, as he spent an unaccustomed Friday evening at home due to illness. “She was a woman of delicate ways”, her son recalls. “Even her Yiddish was dainty”:

I remember how mother prepared for the Sabbath. A few minutes before Sabbath she slipped on festive clothes. The table was already covered with a tablecloth and two challas covered with an embroidered napkin were set across from Father’s place. Near them stood the candles, ready for lighting. Quickly she sat down at the table and performed the commandment of “Honor the father and mother” by writing her weekly letter to her mother, my grandmother. The writing of the letter was accompanied by weeping and silent tears. If there was time she wrote at length and if not, then she kept it short, and rose to light the Sabbath candles… She covered her face and eyes with her delicate hands and murmured the blessing over the candles. The blessing was said quietly, with tears in her eyes. I could feel how the room was being sanctified together with the light of the candles, how an ordinary weekday was becoming holy Sabbath.

Days of awe

On the eve of Rosh Ha-Sahnnah the Rabbi would take all his pupils to the river for tashlich. The young girls stood on the bridge, watching the candles on the planks that floated down with the current, prepared by the boys well beforehand... “A beautiful sight”, as one woman recalls. This same woman tells how her grandmother would recite a blessing over her grandchildren the eve of Yom Kippur. After Yom Kippur came the preparations for Sukkot, with all the booths being decorated with garlands of flowers. But since the weather was most likely to be rainy and cold the children generally spent little time within the gaily decorated booths. Simhat Torah found the synagogue particularly joyous as the men danced in circles with the Rebbe’s own Torah, its golden pomegranates tinkling like bells. The young boys would mill through the dancers waving flags with a lighted candle at one end while the women and girls gazed down at the dancers from the gallery on high.

Purim

What is Purim without a Purimshpiel? Such at least was the sentiment amongst the young people of Kerecke, to the enjoyment of the congregation as a whole. Many a Purim play was born in the home of the Wolf family, in a spacious hall that served both as a shop and as a convenient place for awaiting the twice-daily bus. Here, as one survivor recalls, ideas would be tossed around, scripts read over, acting parts handed out. “of course”, as the man modestly adds, “I’m no drama critic, but the presentation of “Joseph and His Brothers’ made a tremendous impression on one and all”:

Even today I think that these amateur theatre lovers put on plays of high standard. Carrying out such an enterprise in so remote a village was a positive thing in itself… the audience not only enjoyed these plays, but even counted the days till performance. Jews from the neighboring villages of Kusnica, Bereznik and Lisicovo also came to the performance. They even came in from the city of Dolha. I remember the ovation at the end of “Joseph and His Brothers” and at the end of “A Jewish Pioneer from Eretz Israel Fights the Turk”…The Turk in question was a great big dummy stuffed with straw which surrendered to the gallant young pioneer…

Weddings

Sabbath, Rosh Ha-Shannah, Purim – “In Kerecke we also got married”, one survivor reminds us, and goes on to describe a particularly joyful wedding from the days of his childhood. Invitations were not ordinarily sent out for weddings. That every Jew was a welcome guest at a village wedding went without saying. And if a wedding was being held in another village, it made little difference, people just took themselves off by foot as the following anecdote shows:

My parents let me go because everyone else was going, and Kerecke was emptied of children. […] On the way over we passed the castle of the German nobleman, walking between the verdant green of his cornfields and the smaller plots of the farmers… I don’t remember the name of the bride and groom for I was only a child. But I do remember that there was a kind of clown who was marvelous at improvisation rhymes about anyone, without knowing anything about him at all.

True, this wonderful rhymster was somewhat deformed, the skin of his nose having been eaten by frostbite, but the music of the klaizmerim worked their spell on the young child, as did the refreshments and dancing:

I didn’t dance because I didn’t know how, and so found myself looking on from the side, tasting the sweets and hoping that by the time the next wedding came around, I’d be able to take a more active part. We walked home the same way we came, this time in smaller groups. The sound of the violins faded away and changed into the night sounds of the river and the chirping of crickets in the cornfields.

Out of the Ashes

Few Jews came back to Kerecke after the war. One young woman who found her home in ruins writes that “I stayed twenty minutes an then turned my back on the town, knowing I’d never come back”. A woman who returned to Kercke from her wartime refuge in London also found her home in ruins, the kitchen floor strewn with pages from the holy books. Though her gentile neighbors received her with warmth, one of them quietly warned the girl to flee as quickly as possible and, indeed, she left the next day and eventually reached Eretz Israel. A resident of Kerecke who emigrated to Eretz Israel in the years before the destruction, has this to say of his return home:

On the way to find my brother I stopped off in Kerecke. I stayed in my home village for one day alone and ram into Benjamin… I told him where I was headed. Because of my work in the Zionist Movement, I took part in assembling and organizing the survivors, the remnant of the destruction. I suggested that he go with me to Budapest, the collecting point for the Holocaust survivors. Everyone I met I referred there. Most of them took my advice and joined the stream of survivors going towards Budapest. There they were organized into groups, passing through Germany and Italy in order to reach Eretz Israel… Benjamin did not heed my words and stayed in Kerecke.

But few Jewish residents of Kerecke returned from the camps at all. Many of the survivors immigrated to Israel, others to various countries the world over. The Roseman family, center of village life in its good years, is perhaps paradigmatic of the village as a whole. After the war seven souls from the large Roseman family returned from the camps. Three of then emigrated to the United States, the other four made their homes in Eretz Israel. The remainder of the family died in Auschwitz, as did most of the Jews of Kerecke.

Facing the Crematoria

An excerpt

Freida (Hedvah) Klein (Kerecke)

In Monkacs, they boarded us on the train and put us into cattle-cars. It was very crowded inside. Being in those cars was unbearable. Women and children unable to stand did not have air to breathe. Due to the grat crush of people it was hot, and we had a pail for our bodily needs. The drinking water and food did not last us thrugh the journey to Auschwitz. I remember how the man organized a special prayer service. They covered up the pail… wrapped themselves up in their prayer shawls and prayed. There was a felling of impending holocaust, without knowing just what awaited us. My uncle David Klein, held his two-year old son Gedaliah in his arms during the prayer. I remember his handsome face. From the depth of his agony he turned his face upwards, towards the heavens, and wrapped in his prayer shawl called out in a mighty voice: “Master of the world! See my son Gedaliah! Have mercy on him!” My uncle’s face and voice changed beyond recognition when saying these words and he repeated his plea over and over like someone hanging from a cliff by his fingernails before falling into the abyss below. I think he saw the abyss in which he and his family fell afterwards.

When we reached Auschwitz father looked out through the opening of the upper part of the car and said: “There are smoke stacks here, that’s a sin of factories and that we are going to work here…” Before getting off the crowded car, father said to me, and these were his last words before disappearing from me: “Freida, eat everything up so you’ll survive! And anyone who comes back will write to our goy, Palko Grigoj in Kerecke”.

We reached Auschwitz. We sat in the crowded cars. They didn’t let us get off right away. Only at evening did our turn come. The Germans suddenly swung back the doors. There was a wild confusion outside. The German soldiers got us quickly off the train. Groups of Jewish workers helped to lower the children and sick people. The rest of the people had to jump down…

While they were taking me off the train a young Jewish boy dressed in prison clothes told me to say that I was seventeen (I was fourteen). I didn’t trust his intentions and I did not do as he said […] Our knapsacks became heavier and heavier. The Jewish prisoners advised us to let go of them, for the Germans would take them in any case. We didn’t believe them. My knapsack grew too heavy and I wanted to leave it but my brother tried to encourage me: “Don’t abandon your things, we’re getting closer to where we’ll live, just a little more and we’ll be there!” This was a long and eventful day and we didn’t have the strength to go forward. Many of us stumbled. In such confusion it was hard to keep the family together. When we reached the entrance the Germans made order. The first thing they did was to separate the men and put the children with the women. We continued to walk. The men were still alongside us and we walked aling in parallel lines. I remember that our neighbour Simha Steinberg was alongside us, and that he asked my mother to take care of his daughter Ittel. Suddenly, I found myself alone. I couldn’t see my mother and my family, couldn’t see the families of my two uncles. They were motioned off the left with the children and they told me to go straight! It happened so suddenly! I tried to go back and find my family, and I cried. I didn’t recongnize the guiding hand of the Germans in this. When I lost my mother, I tried to go back and join her. I was sobbing terribly. And then I saw two high-ranking German officers with helmets on their heads coming towards me! I saluted them and said in German, “Herr officer, I’m only fourteen years old and I want to go back to my mother” and he soothed me with a smiling face and said in German: “My child! Your mother’s coming right after you!” in the meantime, the SS soldiers carried out their work.Germans blocked both sides of the way, one right next to the other lest somebody try to escape. They hurried us along and shouted at us to keep moving. My mother’s line, the line of the women and children moved on, and I continued to walk with tears in my eyes. Without knowing that I had been chosen to live. With a wave of one hand they motioned us with the rest of the women towards the showers, calling them the “sauna”. We resisted, we didn’t want to enter the showers.

We rebelled, because on the way, in the dark, we saw how they were throwing bodies of people into fiery pits. We demanded to see our men, to make sure they were still alive. The sauna workers and Germans tried to persuade us to enter the sauna but we didn’t want to. Then one of the workers jumped up on a table and announced in a loud voice: “Nothing bad’s going to happen to you, you are only going to wash here and change your civilian clithes for the uniforms in which you will work”. She promised that we would see our men afterwards […] After these convincing words, and not having any other choice, we entered the sauna, a large room where everything went like clockwork. First they ordered us to undress. We remained naked. With the SS soldiers milling around we felt ashamed and terribly humiliated! But we didn’t have much time for thinking, everything took place so quickly.

Chapters in Heroism

One woman saved the hair off our heads, the second on shaved under our armpits and other parts of the body. After this we got a quick shower and received something to wear, a sort of long shirt of gray cloth, without any kind of undergarment. Our appearance changed beyond recognition, bald heads and uniform dress. We couldn’t recognize one and other. I was alone, and throughout the whole time never stopped crying. The Germans kept their promise and brought out our men and showed them to us. They were also shorn of hair and dressed in the striped garment of prisoners. I looked for my father and couldn’t find him, but someone told me she had seen him. Looking back, I know that everything was organized down to the last detail.

The Germans worked us hard,’ from six in the morning till six at night, twelve hours a day without stop. Roll-call took place before six in the morning and after six at night […] But despite all the pressure and the running around at work, they couldn’t hide what was happening only a few yards away from us.

The gas chambers and crematoria! Every switch of the gas chamber was accompanied by screams of “Shema Yisrael” – “Hear, O Israel!” These were the last word that were heard from the gas chambers. “Shema Yisrael!” from a mass of Jews pressed tightly together! In a room disguised as a shower! “Shema Yisrael!” The sound of screaming! The sound of pleading! Of human beings suffocation to death, the weaker ones writhing on the floor, the remainder scrambling over the bodies and gasping for air. And in their mouth, “Shema Yisrael!” Until they too succumbed, and their voice became muted and faint, until finally… quiet![…] Not every Jew who reached Auschwitz knew how to pray. Not all them know how many Jewish martyrs had died with the words “Hear O Israel! The Lord our God, the Lord is one” on their lips. But they all knew that these are the last words a Jews says before his soul departs. While the victims were suffocating and the cry of “Shema Yisrael” still resounding our own breathing came to a stop and we suffocated along with them. We, the daughters of Israel cried without tears and performed our forced labor with a bowed head and a grieving heart. After all, I was only fourteen when I worked across from the crematoria. How different were those calls of “Shema Israel” from those I had heard from my father in synagogue.