The partisan movement was becoming ever more evident, and greatly worried the Germans. At first I had no direct link with the partisans, but each time I received information from local informers about partisan movements, I did everything I could to delay or stop operational intelligence from reaching my superiors. I was not a member of any organization or resistance group, but after a time managed to establish contact with the Jews in the ghetto.
This contact occurred right in the police station. Jews were not allowed to leave the ghetto except for those working in the town for the Germans. Every day two Jewish cleaning women came to the police station but I did not risk talking to them. Another Jew worked in the stables, but I did not feel he could be trusted. This groom fell ill and his replacement was Moshe Milshtein, a member of Akiva I had known in Vilnius. He did not recognize me at first, the black uniform acting like camouflage. Through Moshe a chain of couriers was organized which enabled me to pass on information about operations being prepared against Jews and partisans.
My first attempt to save a Jewish village from destruction failed. The courier passed a warning about the planned operation to the Judenrat but they demanded to be told the source of the information. The courier refused to compromise me. Everybody was afraid of provocations, but the Judenrat finally sent a warning to the village. Here the story was repeated and the villagers sent a girl to Emsk to check how reliable the information was. When she returned home two days later there was not a living soul left.
This village was the first I was sent to as an interpreter. In order to avoid what he called “brutish behavior,” Major Reinhold required the unit to assemble all the Jews in one place and read out the order declaring them enemies of the Reich. As such, they were then shot. Avoiding personal participation in such operations, he instead sent his sergeant-major who, as ill-luck would have it, was a complete sadist.
I hoped that when we arrived we would find the place empty, but to my horror the villagers had not fled. They were all brought to one room, I read out the directive and the officer then wrote down the names of the adults. The children he merely counted. They were all taken to a shed. I hid behind it until the shooting was over. The memory is still as vivid for me as if it happened yesterday.
After operations of this kind there was usually a drunken binge. I sat at the table, translating the soldiers’ jokes from Belorussian into German and greatly regretting that I had no taste for alcohol.
The Judenrat no longer questioned my information and sometimes people did manage to escape to the forest. It is a great puzzle of human psychology that these old Jews, who in their lives had experienced numerous pogroms and the massacre in the town square, obstinately refused to believe there was a plan to exterminate Jews systematically. They had their own survival plan. They had come to an understanding with one of the top local Belorussian officials that he would prevent destruction of the ghetto if they paid him an enormous sum of money. They did not have enough, the official agreed to staged payments, and had been paid a first instalment. Many of them knew perfectly well that this was the trick of a blackmailer, but went on hoping.
Fortunately, there were people in the ghetto who intended to resist and sell their lives dearly. These were mainly young Zionists who had been unable to emigrate to Palestine. They had almost no weapons and I was able to organize a supply. Often the transfer point I used was Semyonovich’s house.
14. 1987, Redford, England
L
ETTER FROM
B
EATA
S
EMYONOVICH TO
M
ARYSIA
W
ALEWICZ
Dear Marysia,
A week has passed and it is only now that I have gathered up my strength to write and tell you that Ivan is dead. He died on 14 May after a year of terrible suffering. The kind of cancer he had did not respond to painkillers and only vodka partly relieved his agony.
His right leg was amputated a year ago, and that may have been a mistake because afterward that dreadful sarcoma spread like wildfire to his bones and he suffered beyond all measure. He did not want to go into the clinic because till the day he died he was afraid the Jews would kidnap him. For some reason he was convinced they would not take him out of our house while I was there, but would for sure if he went to the clinic. He had a whole file of news clippings about war criminals the Jews had abducted, even from Latin America, and put on trial. Even more than a trial, he feared the children would learn the truth about his past. He never got on well with them. The children attended his funeral but left the next day.
I wander through the house for days at a time. It is quite large, with a dining room and kitchen downstairs and four rooms upstairs. The most comfortable, west-facing one I have mentally reserved for you. I so much wish you would come to England and move into this house. Then we would be as happy as we were as children. Do nuns really not have to retire? You will be 63 soon and I am 68. We have another 10 years or so to live. We will go to Mass together the way we did as children, and I will make bigos stew with English cabbage, which is nothing like Polish cabbage, and draniki potato pancakes.
Ivan has left me a large legacy. His greed, from which I suffered all my life, has generated a very substantial sum which will be enough for you and me to live out our lives without cares or having to stint ourselves. I have nobody in the world closer to me than you are. You belong to the one time in my life which was really happy, before the war, in our beloved home with mother, father and Halina. I so loved all of you that I made the sacrifice of marrying Ivan, hoping that he would protect our family, but in the end I saved nobody and only ruined my own life.
After the funeral, I feel desolate. I have dark thoughts, old and new, and they do not leave me in peace for a moment. When I was young I hated my husband. After our family was killed and Henryk was born Ivan tried his best. He helped me to recover my wits and even stopped drinking for a time. The whole of that first year he almost never let Henryk out of his arms. If there was anything good in him it was his love for me and his sons. In truth it is I who wronged him, because I married without loving him in the slightest, and even hating him, while he loved me very much. When the German retreat began and we left with them, how many times I cravenly prayed to God to free me of him. No matter how great his crimes, he never treated me badly. It is I who wronged him. If anyone can judge him it is not I.
My dear Marysia, perhaps my destiny, too, would have worked out differently if we had found each other earlier, before the war ended. I might have had the strength to leave Ivan, but 10 years had passed before I discovered you had survived. It is a miracle that we managed to find each other. I was not looking for you because Ivan was told for a fact that all the Poles had been shot that night. Who could have guessed you had managed to escape?
My invitation for you to come and stay here is entirely serious. I am not extending it in a state of despair or at all frivolously. I can believe you might not want to move to England, but in that case we could settle down in some other part of Europe. We could buy a little house in a quiet village in the South of France or Spain, in the Pyrenees. It’s very pretty there. I remember it from our dreadful journey through France and Spain. I cannot imagine living in modern Poland, but I would consider even that.
Neither of my daughters-in-law, the wives of Henryk and Teodor, would ever move to this house, and anyway, what would they find to do out here in the back of beyond? There isn’t even a decent school. I shall be living here alone until I die. If you should decide to come we could live very happily together. I beg you not to reply immediately but to think it over carefully.
I’m enclosing some photographs, although they are a bit dated. Ivan took them when he was still well. That is our garden around the house. It is a bit overgrown now. I haven’t done anything to it all year but will pull myself together and sort it out. In one photograph you can see our house from the front and in the second, taken from the balcony, you can see the garden. There were photographs of the rooms, too, but they came out very dark and I put them away somewhere and now can’t find them.