Essie is a vibrant woman who looks years younger than her age, and I can see in her still the determination to survive and succeed in whatever she sets her mind to. Currently, she is hoping to publish her own account of her experience as a short memoir geared for schoolchildren. She told me, somewhat in jest, that my book made her angry. “Why?” I asked. “Did I get something blatantly wrong?” (every historical fiction writer’s nightmare). “No,” she said. “Because you wrote about Norwogrodek,” she exclaimed. “That’s my town, my story.”

Though she was joking, the remark gives a writer question to pause. How much responsibility do we have in portraying others’ stories? In writing Escaping Into the Night, I had no intention of portraying the life of any specific person, and merely created composite characters whose experiences were based on things I read. I’m sure the upcoming movie about the Bielski Partisans, Defiance, will have similar fictional elements. Yet having the generic story of the Bielski Partisans recounted in fiction, or even in non-fiction as was done by Peter Duffy and Nechama Tec, doesn’t take away from the compunction to tell your own story–to be in charge of conveying your own experience the way you perceived it, and to have that experience validated by readers.

Essie’s story is a moving and compelling recounting of a remarkable 16-year-old’s struggle for survival. As there will be fewer and fewer living Holocaust survivors in the years to come, it is important for us as a society need to take toward validating, preserving and disseminating the writing of people who actually lived the experience, in order that we take steps toward understanding both hatred and resilience, in the hope that future generations can learn some valuable lessons.

Here’s a picture of Essie and me.

]]> http://ddinafriedman.com/34/2008/06/feed/ 0 http://ddinafriedman.com/essies-story-partisan-and-teacher/2008/04/ http://ddinafriedman.com/essies-story-partisan-and-teacher/2008/04/#comments Sat, 05 Apr 2008 20:15:05 +0000 Dina http://ddinafriedman.com/blog/?p=23 All through the time I was writing Escaping Into the Night, I wondered if there was anyone out there who was part of the Bielski Partisans whom I could speak to. I made a few inquiries at the National Museum of the Holocaust, and heard about people who lived in trees, people who wandered the forests, but no one who was actually there, so I had to piece together details from various memoirs I read about other survivors’ experiences, and historical accounts about the Bielskis.

Imagine my surprise, then, when a friend of mine in response to a review she had posted of Escaping on my Amazon site forwarded me a short letter she had received from Esia Shor, a cousin of Tuvia Bielski and one of the original members of the partisan group.

Esia has written a detailed and compelling account of her life during the war. The story tells how the Germans took over her home town of Norwogrodek, and in one day, killed 4000 Jews in the town, miraculously sparing Esia and her father, but not her mother and sisters. Esia and her father were driven open army trucks to the ghetto, where each “old and dreary” house had four rooms, with twelve people to a room. Food was scarce, just one ration of soup per day, and people stood by the fence that separated the ghetto from the outside world, waiting for a moment that a guard wasn’t looking, then quickly making whispered exchanges through the wooden slats. A Polish couple for whom Esia did domestic work for helped in her first escape, giving her clothes in which to disguise herself and taking her to a cornfield, where she spent the night hiding, but when she stopped at a house the next morning to request a drink of water, she found the Polish police. Esia ran, then jumped into a deep ditch, where she hid for two days. As she tells it,

“I lay in the cold dirt, holding my legs close to my body for warmth and to still the trembling of my body. I kept hearing gunshots and menacing Polish voices repeating, ‘Come out, come out, we’ll find you anyway!’ It was like some nightmarish game of hide-and-seek only with death as the consequence.”

While she was able to avert the police, this escape attempt ended in failure, and Esia returned to the ghetto. However, several months later, she escaped with her cousin and two others who cut a hole in the fence, and made her tortuous way over fifteen miles into the woods to join the Bielski partisans. She was one of the first twenty-five people in the group, which later grew to over 1200 people. There, like my character, Halina, she carried a gun, went on guard duty helped with cooking, and went on missions to procure food from neighboring villages. The group was constantly on the move to avoid being discovered by German soldiers. She lived in the forest for two years. Eventually, after the war was over, she came to the United States, where she became a teacher.

Esia writes, “While it is true that I believed in myself and managed to survive through a combination of courage and chance, the fact is that others, also courageous, died simply because of bad luck.” When I read those words I thought of my characters Halina and Reuven coming to terms with the same issue, how they were brave because they had to be, and how they recognized that they were also lucky. As they set off to try to rescue Batya, Reuven carrying a gun and Halina carrying nothing but her lucky stone, they think about bravery, and how others were just as brave but less lucky. Halina says, “I wasn’t sure if I could believe in God and I didn’t really believe in the stone, either, but I could believe in luck.”

As I read parts of Esia’s story over and over, I am inspired and awed by her bravery, and her luckiness, but even more by her generosity in taking the time to share and, in essence, relive some of the horrors of her experience. Her story, like the stories of so many other survivors, in Esia’s words, “shows us that there is something remarkable about human beings, how they can start over and keep on going. Memories dim, but we should never forget what happened so long ago. This kind of horror should never happen again.”

After The War

(Play 2 lines of “Polish Dance”) This violin helps me to put a voice to the memories, songs, and stories to all of the children who died. As you can see, I made it out of hiding. The Nazis robbed me of my childhood as I always had to be on my guard and never relax, but I am alive.

I remember the thrill of liberation. I watched the American convoys pass. The soldiers gave us chocolate bars and candy. It was heaven and they were so nice and handsome. I have many more stories to tell, but that is for another time. I live in America now and teach violin in a High School.

My Mother was never buried but I did plant a tree in her remembrance. Whenever I see it I think of her knowledge of trees and how she died trying to achieve the freedom that they represent. Father has a tree too, right next to Mother’s so I know they are close together right now, wherever they are.

Epilogue

All Jews were targeted for death, but the children’s death rate was very high. “Of the estimated 216,000 Jewish youngsters deported to Auschwitz, only 6,700 teenagers were selected for forced labor; nearly all the others were sent directly to the gas chambers. When the camp was liberated on January 27, 1945, Soviet troops found just 451 Jewish children among the 9,000 surviving prisoners.”[1]

The Bielski Brothers saved more than 1,200 Jewish men, women and children from perishing in the Holocaust. They were called “The Forest Jews,” They built an elaborate village in the woods and rescued Jews and used guerilla attacks against the Nazis. They stockpiled weapons and supplies to kill the enemies. No Jew was turned away from their “Jerusalem in the Woods.”

[1] Holocaust Encyclopedia

Sneaking Around With The Partisans

Mother and I knocked on the door of a man that we had heard might help us.  “Yes?” he asked.  He could tell at once that we were Jewish.  We asked if he could help us hide.  He smiled “come in. What are your names?” he asked.  “I am Janine, and this is Hanne,” replied Mother.  “Not anymore” he said.  “You will now need new names.  We will figure that out later, but you need a story and it is best if you stick with your story even when no German is around so as you don’t get confused.”  Then we talked a while about what we were going through.  Then he said “If you want to join the partisans then you are going to need to get your things and get ready for a move.”

We were moved into the woods a little ways outside the ghetto.  We lived in camouflaged homes built into the ground.  We were still hungry but could sneak out at night and raid leftovers from the farms like cabbage, onions, carrots, beets and potatoes.  Mother had grown up knowing so much about the outdoors.  She could tell us everything, which berries were poisonous, what tree would provide the most shade even in winter when most of the leaves had fallen off.  And when the adults went on missions, I would watch the children.  Everyone pooled their talents and the little that we had.  One lady had been a teacher so she gave us lessons.  There was a Rabi who made sure we had our religious teachings.  One of the new families had smuggled in a violin and we were able to share it and play.  I even enjoyed practice!  Although we moved a lot the Germans once found us.  They discovered a couple of underground homes in which there were a few people. They shot and killed them all.  One was a six year old girl, four were men, and the last one was my mother.  I knew she was dead without even having to see the body, it was one of those things where I could feel myself ripping apart just thinking why couldn’t that be Hitler?  Why, Why, Why?!! I wanted to scream but someone pulled me along.  I thought of going back and saying here I am kill me let me be with her and daddy!  But that would be stupid and I needed to help people so all I could do was make my heart cold, and stay like that until the end of the war.

Following is the first part of Victoria’s piece. The rest will follow in another post.

Hanne: A Young Jewish Girl’s Story

Mother loved that wretched thing; well she didn’t have to practice it every single day. It hurt my arm, holding it up. Sometimes I just wanted to throw the piece of wood away. My chance came. German Officers were coming around asking for all musical instruments, my mother wanted to hide it, but I said “no you can’t defy law!” So she came down with my violin and with sad eyes gave it to the officer. A little bit later Germany said I couldn’t play with my non-Jewish friends, not even go to school with them!! We were no longer allowed at the pool or the ice skating rink. Girls had to add Sarah to their name and boys had to add Israel. I was now Hanne Sarah. We also had to carry an identification card. Mother handed me a Star of David and said I had to wear it, all day, everyday.

We were ordered to pack our things once. “Moving, that’s what we were doing” said father. “Just imagine it as an adventure”. The Ghetto Rules were horrible. We couldn’t stop near the fence, we had to be quiet and work hard, we had a curfew and could not go through the streets after dark, we had to salute German officials and we could not have jewelry. We could only send letters from the ghetto to friends back home on certain days. Of course we didn’t always follow the rules. During work we whispered to each other when the Germans weren’t looking, and mother and I had a tiny set of jewelry we hid under a floorboard of our ghetto house. When we arrived at our new home, we were appalled. It was disgusting.

We didn’t have much to unpack since we had become poor just before we moved. Mother and Father could no longer work their jobs because of the laws. Mother got a factory job, just as I did in a different factory. Father got a job digging ditches. Mother and I both tried to clean the house a little with a piece of cloth I had found off the streets. Everyone had to work in the ghetto. When another family moved in with us things became even harder. I slept on the floor. There was hardly room to stand. The new family was bothersome. I felt cold-hearted like Hitler and the Nazi’s when I thought it for I knew they all had to go through the same trouble, but the other family was the type to snitch on any Jews breaking the rules just because they wanted to try to stay in favor with the Nazis and live. We were always hungry. We were given one loaf of bread per week and it tasted like cardboard. Our soup was a pot of water with an old turnip in it.

Then one day when I heard the news I didn’t know what to do. The other family had apparently told German soldiers that we had been doing something illegal and so the Nazis went to find father, then took him to a ditch and shot him along with others. Mother cried all day.

At one point Mother said to me “Hanne, I would like you go on the Kindertransport, any children in this camp are allowed to go. It will take you to England where you can live with a foster family.” But I told her that I could be anywhere, even away from the Nazis, and still be unhappy because I was not with her. So, I stayed. We knew that whatever happened though, we could NOT go to a concentration camp. Not one single person had we ever known to come back from one. Mother looked into ways of getting out of the Ghetto. And one day Mother heard that a group called the Partisans was helping many Jews go into hiding in the forest.

What I would like to do with this section of my website is to post some children’s and teen’s writing about the Holocaust and invite responses to this as a way of open sharing about how the Holocaust still affects us, even though it happened 60 years ago. Some questions to think about:

What lessons does the Holocaust teach us? What can we do about similar atrocities motivated by racial hatred that are still going on in the world today?

As a start to this discussion, I am posting a poem by 8th grader Greg Wong. A sestina is a special form of poetry. There are six stanzas with six lines each. The same six words end all the stanzas (though not in the same order). The poem ends with three lines that again use all of the same six words.

Please feel free to respond to Greg’s amazing poem, and to send your own finished pieces.

SESTINA

Here they come, with their helmets

Here they come, with their boots

Every time they come, another forcibly leaves

And they know who to take for our people are in the ghettoes.

How have we wronged

The people that treat

us so? Do we deserve no treats?

Do they? With their proud helmets

and all the wrong

They have brought to the world via their shining black leather boots

They threw us in the ghetto

Prisons and made us leave

Our homes. How can they make us leave

What we have worked so hard for – the treats

We have earned. The crowded ghetto

Gets no shielding from the helmets,

And no way to be carried on by the boots.

Why has everything gone wrong?

All that has been wronged

Cannot be fixed, nor can the colored leaves

That fall free without hesitation. Now the boots

Are heard marching, treating

The dirt with a violent rage. I see the helmets

Of the men marching through the ghetto

They have no remorse for the people in the ghetto,

They care not how they have wronged

us. All these men care about is their own power, shown as a simple helmet

I hear children crying to stay and not leave,

The men see this as a treat,

And the children are silenced with a swing of the man’s boot.

He used an example of his power, through use of a boot.

The whole time, I watch through a window in my house in the ghetto

I see that the men do not have feeling for the treatment

Of people, of how they wrong

Us. I can’t stand to watch any longer as the family leaves

For the death camp. There, there are too many helmets.

They treat us, as if we have wronged,

Beating us with boots, as we starve in the ghettoes

For if we do not leave, we face death, without the protection of a helmet

Greg Wong