KUPISHOK: The Memory Stronger

Part 2

In the following pages are the testimonies of two of the survivors of Kupishok who escaped death by the only way possible – running. I don’t know how to describe the personality of a survivor - both seem to be people.

Like any others. I think I noted a certain steeliness buried within their voices; More likely it was my imagination. Perhaps there is a certain suspicion, a certain alertness to an impending danger. When Dort T. F. responded to my advertisement in a Russian language newspaper, she asked in her letter, “Excuse me for a modest question. Who are you and what is the goal to collect material about Kupishok?” Later, in Israel, when we met, she told me that she believes that some of the Lithuanians who murdered Jews managed to escape to the United States after the war, are still living there. Perhaps one of them was seeking out Jewish survivors of Kupishok, to complete his work. She still lives in terror.

Gerson O., on the other hand, had no hesitancy in introducing himself as a survivor and as one who had helped erect a monument to those who perished. He knew the Tuber family, my cousins, and was still friends with them in Israel.

Both Dora and Gerson were teenagers in Kupishok in 1941. Dora came to Israel trained in law and is now a lawyer, called an advocate; she lives in Tel-Aviv. Gerson is a butcher and lives in Kiryat Yam, a small town north of Haifa. He came to Israel in 1966 from Vilna where he had settled after the war.

Incidentally, in her recollections Dora makes the statement to the effect that the two trains that left Kupishok were authorized by the Russians for evacuation, one may infer, of Jews. It should be noted that there is no factual basis for such an inference. Some evacuation occurred of “Soviet administrators or skilled workers. The Soviet authorities never accorded special help to Jews in order that they might escape Nazi persecution” (Encyclopedia Judaica, Vol. 8, P. 908). Further, “…on the eve of the German-Soviet war (June 1941) thousands of Jews, together with non-Jewish ‘bourgeois’ and ‘unreliable’ elements from eastern Poland and annexed Baltic states and Romanian provinces were deported to and imprisoned in the Soviet far north and far east.”

Their testimonies are nearly verbatim taken from their recorded and written words but adjusted for grammar and arranged for clarity, subject to such errors as my come about as a result of the translation from Yiddish to English. Between the two testimonies there may be some slight conflicts of details, to be forgiven in the passage of thirty-eight years since the events.

THE TESTIMONY OF GERSON O.

No Jew now lives in Kupishok. There was no concentration camp there. The ones who remained in Kupishok for the coming of the fascists were shot and killed right away. A very few were taken to the Kovno ghetto. Even some of those who were on the road as refugees and were captured, were taken back to Kupishok and shot. Those who were on the road and avoided immediate capture managed to escape into Russia.

There were 400 Jewish families in Kupishok at the outbreak of the war. Perhaps 50 families escaped. Ella and Shmerl and Josef Tuber, for instance, ran away into Russia. I left Kupishok the twenty-fifth of June. Kupishok was burning. The Germans came on the twenty-sixth. I ran to Russia. Those who got to Russia were saved. The Lithuanians of Kupishok did the killing. Officers were Germans, the Lithuanians were the shooters. Yes, the Lithuanians did the killing, and after the was a lot of them went to America.

Pezes was one of the Lithuanian leaders. I can’t remember after so many years the name of another of the leaders, but I can see him and I remember where he lived, near the Kupa River.

About the Tuber brothers, Laibel was left in the Brigad Militsia, I know that. Pesakh, also, but Berel I’m not sure. (According to Ell and Josef Tuber whom I interviewed a few days later, only Laibel tried to fight and died in Kupishok; the other three brothers, Yechiel, Berel and Pesakh, were on one of the two trains to leave Kupishok and were killed in a German bombing and strafing attack on the train. –SM) Josef was a little child and went with his sister, Ella, and father, Shmerl, to run away. But the other brothers were older.

The Brigad Militsia was formed to defend themselves against the Germans. They were all killed. I had been in the Brigad Militsia, but I had hurt a hand, it was swollen, and I couldn’t hold a gun. They gave me a release, and I found a place on the last train to leave. The Brigad Militsia was composed of all Jews (This may not be so; there were probably two Lithuanian teenagers in the group also. –SM) and was formed as a part of the Russian Army while it was still in Lithuania, just before the Germans came. The Russians ran away also along with the Jews because they were also killed.

I was in the Russian Army for four years, until I got out in 1945. I was wounded, and I spent thirteen months in the hospital. I receive a wound pension from Israel. After the war I came back to Kupishok for a short time, and then I moved to Ponevezh and later on to Vilna because there were more Jews there. Every left the smaller towns and congregated together in the larger cities.

We build the memorial in Kupishok in 1946 or 1947. We all contributed to the cost, without the help of the government. There are no names on the monument, only it is written, “Here lie the Kupishok Jews who were murdered by Hitlerish hands.” They didn’t let us mention Lithuanian hands.

All of the Brigad Militsia were buried in a common grave near the old Jewish cemetery. Berel is there, Laibel is there. Davidke Glazer, too.

Some of the gentiles took the children, some too the Jewish possessions. And the children they killed. There were others who were good gentiles who took the money and the children and they raised the children until the war ended. One man, a Jew, who had been in Russian Army Intelligence, after the war went around to find and collect such Jewish children. So that such children should no longer by raised by Christians and should learn that they were Jewish. It was in such a way that this man found a little nephew of mine. He found the boy one night and brought him out. Then he heard of a little girl hidden in another place. Some Lithuanians ambushed him and killed him. He was a very good man – did a lot of good deeds.

There were three synagogues in Kupishok. There was a Hebrew school for the smaller children. Jews lived in the center of town; gentiles lived on the edges and in small farms surrounding.

I came to Israel in 1966. It took a long time, several years, to get permission from the Russians to let us out. I was not in a ghetto or a concentration camp.

THE TESTIMONY OF DORA T.F.

In 1941 there lived in Kupishok about 2,000 Jews. When the was came, most of them were left in the town; only a small part of them fled. Those who stayed died. In the first days the young Jewish boys, ages seventeen to twenty, about twenty-five of them, formed a defense group against the Lithuanian maximalists (fascist nationalists). Not one of them remained alive.

On Sunday, when the war broke out, many Jews came into Kupishok from neighboring small villages and towns like Subotch (Subacius) and Vishinte (Viesentos).

Some of the Jews of Kupishok began to leave, but two rabbis of the town pleaded with them not to flee because in the First World War the Germans were not harmful to Jews. It would be worse, they said, to go to the Russians. About eighty families left anyway, but some of them had to return. Some few of the Jews tried to escape in wagons and on horses to the small farms where they hoped the farmers would save them if they were paid. The farmers betrayed them, and they were returned to Kupishok around the end of July to the beginning of September together with other Jews from the farm-villages in the surrounding area around Kupishok. They lived, at most, two months.

The principal of my school urged me not to leave. The last gymnasia exam was on Saturday, and the war began the next morning, on Sunday. We went to school on the twenty-third of June and asked for papers because we wanted to leave and we needed identification papers. “Why do you have to run?” he asked. “you can come to my house and if you wish, bring your mother and father. We will give you a room; you can stay there until this is all over.” Two other girls he talking staying Fraidele Reznikovitch and Yachne Resnikoff. These girls asked me if I was going to stay with him. I told them that I was leaving, that I had gone to see him to have my papers signed.

Yudit Shapiro, fifteen years old, she hid out on a farm, then another. But she was caught and horribly murdered.

The Soviet Army retreated, and they passed out guns and ammunition to those youngsters who were to stand and fight the Germans. The boys were deployed in various places in town. Shroyel Gershuni, Berele Ash, Yoske Shusterman…others…and two Lithuanian students also. A monument was erected for them at the Shepata marshes; in Lithuanian and Russian it reads, “To those who fought the Fascist murderers.”

Two trains left Kupishok – authorized by the Russians for evacuation – but one train was bombed; it didn’t get through. The second train made it, and those on board got through to Russia and most survived. On June 25 (Wednesday) the Germans were in Subotch. My family got on the last train, but in Latvia it was bombed. We survived and went the rest of the way by foot into Russian, about thirty kilometers. Sholem Joseph Gershon survived the train bombing, and he started running, but they shot him. Most of the cars were for cattle, one or two were passenger cars. Near Rokishok, about forty kilometers from Kupishok, the engineer stopped the train in order to throw off the Jews and take their belongings. There were Lithuanian nationalists there who attacked the train and wanted to begin killing Jews and also steal their possessions. But on this train, there were some Russian soldiers who were also escaping who fought them off.

Members of forty-seven families from Kupishok survived – about two hundred souls – and Kupishok fared better than other towns. Two girls lived – Rosa Binbinder was a student in Vilna and Deborah Levinson was working in Kovno. But all those who stayed, died

The Misnaged Rabbi, without his hat, was roped to a cart and dragged down the street. The driver of the cart was Graitchinas. (After the war he was sentenced to fifteen years in jail, but soon got out). Everybody was laughing at this spectacle. It was like a festival. The harassment was initiated by the Lithuanian nationalists, the so-called “intelligentsia,” but mostly just drunkards who killed the Jews in Shimantzy, Vishinte, Palavene and other towns besides Kupishok.

A group of Jews was gathered and held in the small jail near the Kupa River without food or water. There was another group held in the cellar of the rural district building, the city hall. A large group of people from Kupishok and other towns, old and young, were gathered near the market place near the Vilna Gahs. They were all shot, altogether about 2,000 people. The annihilation process was conducted in three stages. At the beginning of July, the youngsters who were supposed to fight the invaders were shot behind the railroad station at the Shepata marsh; some of the people at the cemetery Laisvanoriy Hapas behind the church; and another place of execution was at the Jewish cemetery located between the high school and the barracks.

The shooting was directed by a German who had been a teacher in the Lithuanian gymnasia (high school) and who was a provocateur. When he first came to town he said he had come to work for the Communists to organize the Comsomol (Communist Youth). His name was Verner Lyova. They tried him in Russia later, and sentenced him to death in absentia. He was not found and continued to live under an assumed name in the days after the war, on a farm outside Minkhe(?). Where he is now, no one knows.

Some Lithuanians, let by the drunken Lisankas, shot the small children during one night at three or four o’clock in the morning. The children were wailing and crying, so they had some musicians along who blew their horns and trumpets very loudly to drown out the noise so that people living nearby couldn’t hear the cries of the children. The old Doctor Frantskevitch was brought to the scene of the shooting to sign certificates that the children died from illnesses. Lyova was the overall leader of this, as always.

Others helped Lyova, standing by, shooting Jews and throwing them into graves. A woman teacher, the mistress of Lyova, also took part in the massacres. Graitchinas was later tried, Lisankas was set free; both were wealthy farmers. Balchnas and Petrulis were tried. Narkevitch was a drunk, a foreman; he was tried and is probably dead. Yakantas, a gymnast, and Vaitchikunas got to the United States, I believe. Tamashunes graduated from the gymnasia with me; he was tried after the war, served his sentence and returned to Kupishok. The old Doctor Frantskevitch is dead. He practiced in Kupishok for many years After the war I spoke with him.

The only Lithuanian who wanted to help Jews was a former priest named Ragalskis. He became a free-thinker and a teacher of Latin in the Lithuanian school. He tried to save a few Jewish students. But he was forcefully warned and threatened by the German, Lyova; he was unable to do anything more, and he left Kupishok. The rest of the gentiles not only permitted, but many actively participated in the shooting of Jews.

We wanted a monument to be erected near the old Jewish cemetery. We asked the authorities several times, after the war, to fence the area and erect a monument. They said they would, but they did nothing. So we collected money from among ourselves and with some help from American Jews, and we made a memorial stone with an inscription in three languages: Yiddish, Russian and Lithuanian. We took the monument to the authorities, and they said they would specify a date for the commemoration with appropriate ceremonies and gathering of people. But they didn’t do it. I had some acquaintances in various Soviet agencies, and they said that a petition should be prepared, not in our names, but in the names of some of the older people – Mr. Ginsberg, Moishe Traub, Yitzhak Polin – older Jews who were already on pensions and had no fear of career restraint. Which we did, and it came to pass. They erected our monument…behind the church…the old cemetery which they fenced around…in Lithuanian and Russian.

THE BOOK OF QUESTIONS

Most books about the holocaust are written by survivors or by doctors of the mind; or by literary figures who make a story of it. This effort is an uncommon one, compiled by a person who is neither a survivor nor one trained in the disciplines of the mind or arts. A bystander, an American Jew, whose connection is metaphysical to a nondescript town in northeastern Lithuania. Why, the survivors ask me, are you interested in Kupishok and what happened there?

The question nagged at me. I avoided it, and it kept returning. Other questions too: What makes a survivor? What would I have done if I had been in Kupishok in June of 1941? What business have I in writing this? Why should I – or anyone – care if the memory of Kupishok and its Jews stays alive? How do I come to assume responsibility for that? A book of questions.

How could people be killed in such numbers? How could people kill in such numbers? I thought of Jerusalem and the Garden of the Righteous Gentiles which is at the approach to Yad Vashem, the memorial to the victims of the Holocaust. Trees planted in an area perhaps twenty or thirty feet wide, maybe a hundred yards long. Each tree bears the name of a gentile who at personal risk saved the lives of Jews. And outside Jerusalem is the Forest of the Martyrs, planted with thousands upon thousands of trees. I wondered: If the Garden of the Righteous Gentiles were larger, would the Forest of the Martyrs be smaller?

There is a literary technique which presents a known factual event in a fictional manner sometimes so imaginative that the reader finds himself in suspense at the outcome which, in fact, he knows for certain. Did it really happen?

I looked at these people, these survivors, and they were quite ordinary. The familiar Jewish inflection, the Lithuanian Jewish humor. There was nothing unusual about them. I stop and look again. But they are unusual. These were survivors and I tried to find the common element, the thread, that binds them; the mind-set that is common to them that makes them survivors. I imagined I saw something in their eyes. No, just a romantic notion. No such thing. Was there something about their personalities? No, nothing in particular. Unless you call their ethnicity a personality and some say that is so. What caused 400 people to flee Kupishok in those late days of June 1941, 200 of them to survive? What caused those 1600 who stayed in Kupishok, who stayed there and died, to do that? What was the difference between individuals of the two groups? Was one smarter than the other? Was one more sophisticated than the other? Why did Sheva Fega Dorman who since the age of three has not been able to hear, to speak, to write, to read – what caused her to take her two small daughters and run from Kupishok as she had as a small child herself in the first days of the First World War? How did she sense the fate? Was she simply a natural war refugee? Her life occupation?

In another life-threatening situation would the same runners run again, would the same freezers freeze again? Would those who lived this time live the next time? Is there a consistency? There apparently is some animal instinct of doom that overtakes some people and causes them to run, and leaves other unbelieving in the path of the catastrophe. Animals of the wild who bolt seemingly for no reason but that they have some secret sense of apprehension of danger; an inner eye, an inner ear for it, a nose that smells an odor not sensed by others.

Were the heroes those who stayed? Those who fled and lived and tell the story? Is it wrong to speak of heroes? No heroes, no cowards, no judgement. We have no right to judge.

I came to consult with two psychiatrists, two doctors of the mind, to ask them: Why am I interested in Kupishok? Why am I doing this? The first was CH, a Jew and a student of the holocaust himself. The other was TR, non-Jew raised in a Christian home who was familiar with prejudice from his own experience. It went like this:

Ch: You keep punishing yourself. Not having been there, you think, makes it impossible for you to write it. You have come to them without any expectation of reward. They didn’t even know you were alive. You are not committed to coming back to them. And that’s what they respond to. The reason they give you their attention and their respect is that they know, more than you do, that you don’t have to be there. It is an issue of choice – most people of Kupishok were not there because they chose to be, but by an accident of fate. They cannot escape it. But you could! And you choose to return.

SM: I had to. It was a matter of desperation…

CH: Are you afraid?

SM: Afraid?

Ch: Afraid if you were in that situation that you might not have run?

SM: That’s right. And that’s the wonder, the fear. After all, the majority in Kupishok stayed.

Ch: I sense that you feel guilty that you never had to confront that decision. That you can’t write about it, never been placed in that situation, never had to make that decision, that choice.

SM: I don’t see how anyone can imagine confronting that decision – it’s not the kind of catastrophe one plans for.

CM: That’s true. And yet I think that you have confronted it many times. More so than Yechiel. Yechiel only once. But you live with it like a monkey on your shoulder. You have spent a lot of time with it, a lot of emotional energy. You have also raised one of your sons to be a rabbi which is of no small consequence. Since Yechiel was a rabbi.

SM: I didn’t know, before this search started, that he was a rabbi. I knew him to have been a yeshiva student….

CM: … an imaginary conversation with Yechiel Tuber…

SM: Why are you running? Why are you staying?

            (I don’t know – at this time – if he is more sophisticated than I am in matters of life and death. In knowing what to run from and what to run to.) We have to leave. The Germans are coming. But the Russians have not been notable for their kindness to Jews. Perhaps if we sit tight, we will endure whatever restrictions they put on us…it will be better than throwing ourselves on the mercy of the Russians…There is no historical record of pogroms here in Kupishok – perhaps in the larger cities of Lithuania, but not here. After all, the two rabbis here are urging the people not to run. Maybe we should stay. You can stay if you wish. I am going…

CH:     …and you are afraid they will say: listen, this book has been usurped and the nature of our experience has been translated in your eyes into a self-aggrandizing monument. That would surprise me. More reasonable, it seems, is that they will feel that you haven’t told it right. That there is a lot missing, that you can’t retain the passion, that you haven’t been able to transmit the feeling, that you will have fallen short, that they will be disappointed.

SM:     Well, all of that, but mostly I think I am fearful that they will think that I have come as a stranger and taken their story – the story of their town – and used it for myself. That I will have written about myself: not Kupishok. That’s disturbing.

CM: So what? Who really cares?

SM: I care.

CH: But that would be a discourtesy – not to write it. It would be a discourtesy to them – to indulge in this metaphysical morality about your unworthiness to produce it.

SM: How will it be, when I give them copies of this work and they say: but this book is not about Kupishok, only half of it. The other half is about you.

CH: Ah, well, I hadn’t thought about that before. So part of it is that you will be judged by them, that you will not be worthy in their eyes.

SM: That I will have seized the opportunity to write about myself, when I told that that I was writing about Kupishok…This event – the Holocaust – in Jewish history ranks with the giving of the law at Sinai and with the destruction of the Temple…and the writing of it must be treated with respect and holiness…

CH: Which demands that you suffer more? You have not suffered enough?

SM: Which demands that those who approach the Aron Ha-kodesh do so with clean hands and pure heart…unblemished.

CH: That’s a very difficult mantle to bear…unless you are unblemished you are unworthy.

SM: In that sense maybe no one should write about it.

CH: That’s not what the survivors say. As a matter of fact, they want you to write it desperately.

SM: Yes.

Elie Weisel writes, “I owe them my roots and memory. I am duty-bound to serve as their emissary, transmitting the history of their disappearance, even if it disturbs, even if it brings pain. Not to do so would be to betray them, and thus myself.” I turned to Dr. TR.

TR: …on your good days, what do you think?

SM: ON my good days, I think of the books of Elie Wiesel which always contains beggars and madmen. The madmen seem to be the ones who speak the truth, whatever the truth is, and if you can understand what they are saying. He seems to endow them with a special quality, the beggars, too. So maybe, it’s simply that I am crazy, that I am mad. Which I guess would be an honor. Weisel didn’t write about the Holocaust for years, I think maybe ten years went by before he began and then only at the urging of the French writer, Malraux. He tells of a vision that he had, that all of the survivors would meet in a forest somewhere, and they would take an oath never to speak of the Holocaust – and that silence would drive the world crazy, would drive the world mad. But another theme that I detect in his works is that the story, all stories, must be remembered and told.

TR: You have talked before and said things with which I don’t disagree and which I don’t challenge. Perhaps it is literally impossible to speak truth about the Holocaust; the scale was so vast that it is overpowering. I think part of your search for Kupishok is a search for a microcosm that might make sense, might make it comprehensible. I think that is what you are doing.

SM: It is still not comprehensible to me, or to anyone else whose writings I have read. It is simply not comprehensible, and it may be that that is the answer. That it is not

understandable. Even, that it has no meaning. No meaning in human terms, no meaning in theological terms.

TR: It may be. You are also coming up with a whole new set of questions of Kupishok which I find fascinating. Last week we talked about who survives. You talked about Sheva. She survives. What made survivors? Is there something that distinguishes those who survive and those who didn’t? I think it sounds bizarre and almost heartless, but I thought about it after you left. I wondered if there was any way that one could distinguish those who survive accidently from those who worked to survive. Those who survived, say, because the death camps were overrun before they could have been gassed and cremated but who were already slated for that, as opposed to those who somehow got into labor work forces or disappeared into the countryside.

SM: There may be something to that, but the death camps came later. The death camps had not started at the time of the Kupishok murders. By that time they were all dead in Kupishok. It was in that period of June to late August or September of 1941, that the killing was done by mobile killing units, the shooters. The Einsatzgruppen had been trained for the purpose of hunting down and shooting Jews and their methods were to enlist the support of the local populations: Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Latvians, Poles. Because the total personnel of the four Einsatzgruppen that covered the whole territory from the Baltic all the way down to the Black Sea was about 3,000. The ended up being responsible for killing 1,400,000 Jews – before the death camps. But then the invasion by the Germans was successful so that many millions of Jews came into their hands because of the territory that they controlled by the fall of 1941. I presume it became inefficient to do the killing that way because of the vast numbers that they had to contend with. They even hired mobile gas vans, killing them with monoxide gas, but that was a sloppy way of doing things for Germans. That was when somebody got the idea of gas chambers and ovens and killing centers and then they developed a regular automated system like building a ford automobile. But it was incredible that number of people who first were killed by bullets. And that is the way those people – men, women, and children – were killed in Kupishok. They never reached a ghetto. There was a small ghetto in the town for just a few weeks while they gathered some of the people who lived in surrounding farm villages and shtetls and brought them in until they had maybe 3,000 people there altogether. Then in three stages they took them out and killed them. I am not certain that there were many Germans involved. I have a list of half dozen or so names of Lithuanian nationals. Maybe I am mesmerized with it because I could have been there. Very easily. My father left a sister there. What if the sister had come to America and my father stayed? I would have been a child in Kupishok. When I looked those people that thought went through my head. They didn’t look any different than, I do, just dressed differently in style. I wear American clothes; they wear Israeli or European clothes. So I told them – part of what I told them in answer to their question, it really wasn’t an answer – that I wanted to develop a memorial to the dead that they could have to give to their children. But that’s not the whole thing; there is something else.

How can people kill like that? Is there some kind of mob psychology that was at work in Europe? Is it possible that if you picked an individual and took him out of that milieu that he would be a normal farmer or normal high school student or normal school teacher – as some of those killers in Kupishok were – and that he never would have killed a person in his life. Is it possible that when you put all of those people together under an atmosphere, a certain kind of atmosphere, they then become raving murders? Just like a small lynch mob years ago would hang a person from a tree in the South – can that kind of mob psychology extend over thousands and hundreds of thousands of people, so that all of them either do nothing or they kill. One of the two.

TR: Yes, there is such a thing. But I think that it would not have happened in this country to Jews in the same way it happened in Europe. I think it could happen to Blacks here.

Because America has an institutionalized national history of violence toward Blacks. It doesn’t have an institutionalized history of violence toward Jews. That is not to say that Jews have not been assaulted here. But Europe had that kind of background particularly Poland, Ukraine, the Baltic States, White Russia; they had an institutionalized history of Jew hatred through the Church and through politics, both. They were intertwined. It was national policy supported by the Church.

SM: Also, the other way around by the way. There was a Church institution of Jew-hatred as well, programmed for centuries.

TR: The second this is one of the most frightening bits of social psychological research that I’ve ever learned about, that was done about three or four years ago. They took two groups of students and assigned to one group the role of guards and assigned to the other group of students the role of prisoners. After a few weeks they had to stop the experiment because the guards had begun to become brutal, were treating the prisoners in inhuman fashion. Enjoying it! Then I go from that to a work by Robert

Ardrey called, I believe, “African Genesis”. Here Ardrey establishes to his satisfaction that man is a killer. One of his comments is that, of all living creatures except rats – rats and one other – man is the only species that systematically will destroy. His explanation, or theory, was that all killer animals have a gesture of submission which almost paralyzes its foe; of all the animals capable of destruction, man alone has no built-in signal for submission that will break the tension. I don’t know where all that fits, but somewhere in there in the midst of whether it is institutionalized Jew-hatred by church and state, the psychology of guards versus prisoners and the notion that man’s a killer with no “off” switch – somewhere in there are your questions’ answers perhaps.

SM: Well, there seems to be something in man that apparently likes to kill.

TR: Why certain men at certain times and certain places, is a question.

SM: I’ll give you one. There is something about Christianity that causes its adherents to kill in the name of Christianity, and I don’t understand that. Why is it? Why is the history of Christianity so replete with killing, not just Jews, but South American Indians or Blacks in the South, or each other. Is there something in the nature of the teaching and the belief that causes that?

TR: There are two parts of Christianity from my perspective. There are two aspects of Christianity that have that tendency.

SM: You have thought of it before?

TR: Yes. Born to a mother who practices Christianity I’ve been around the edges of faith all my life. It has been one of my questions. Two things. One is that it is the return of the repressed, that is my psychological feeling.

SM: The return of the repressed?

TR: Christianity talks about love, charity, goodness. All of the darker side of the mountain is denied or legislated against. It is called sinful and somehow we are supposed to live in a sin-free life. But nobody can life a sin-free life. Then there is the return of all of the dark part, focused not in terms of dealing with the dark part in need, but projected outwardly, saying that the other represents all the forces of darkness. I am with God and with the forces of light – so it goes – and all that is negative belongs to the Jew, or the Catholic or the Protestant depending on which part of Ireland. So that is part of it. The other part is, that by focusing from the beginning…one of the central issues of Christianity is afterlife and the immortality of the soul and the transience of life on this earth. So in the name of the savior of souls, one takes lives.

SM: In the name of saving souls, one can what?

TR: One can take life.

SM: Because that is not as important as the saving of a soul, is that what you are saying?

TR: That was the whole Inquisition, was it not? And since those who had not been baptized and those who did not confess Christ as their savior are damned anyway. That is the basic doctrine of the church, if you do not confess Christ. Kill South American Indians who do not confess Christ? God is going to do worse to their souls, anyway. Ignorance is no excuse, either.

SM: There was a writer, Israel Zangwill I believe, whose explanation for anti-Semitism was that the Jews gave to Christians this concept of love and morality and gave them their God, and Christians couldn’t live up to it. They can’t make it and so they turn their anger on the people who gave them this God and this concept. In effect, the Christians themselves kill Christ and his message of love.

TR: …the general tenor of Judaism, at least in my understanding, has been a striving but without the expectation of sure perfection.

SM: And no role model, come to think about it. Even Moses was a murdered.

TR: …and was not entitled to see the Promised Land…

SM: In Jewish legend there are only three tzadikim, three saintly-type personalities. I can only think of two of them. Joseph in Egypt was one because he resisted the advances of Pharaoh’s wife and another was Daniel for keeping the faith even in the lion’s den. I can’t think of the third one. They are the only three and even then it is really legend and myth. They really are not saints. Jewish history recognized personality warts from Abraham on.

TR: …great men do not achieve perfect life, they are not perfect creatures. One can honor their contribution to truth or history and not deify or sanctify. In that sense there was a great opportunity to acknowledge the dark side of the soul, whether it is David lusting or Solomon’s penchant for opulence. It is there and you don’t try to make light of or deny it…

And yet, and yet, after we have gone through all of this, institutionalized Jew-hatred, social psychological research, the inherent nature of man, we come back to the basics: men shoot innocent Jewish children in the middle of the night, trumpets playing some melody to drown out the cries.

Claire Huchet-Bishop writes that not only did traditional Christianity die at Auschwitz; Western civilization died there, too. I think both died earlier, more precisely in time in the Summer of 1941 on the night when the children of Kupishok were being led to their shooting-place accompanied by trumpeters playing tunes to drown their cries.

Huchet-Bishop continues: “Had the Christian church taken an unequivocal stand against the Nazis, upholding the moral and spiritual values Hitler flaunted, it might have suffered severe persecution, but it would have saved the respect due those values; and this it might have remained a beacon on earth, especially in the West. In capitulating to unspeakable evil through its indifference to the fate of the Jews, the church as an institution not only signed its own moral death warrant, but also unleashed in the world unrestrained reliance upon violence as a solution for all personal, impersonal, national and international conflict. In the most critical hour of its history, the church betrayed its mission. Today the whole world suffers the consequences.”

We have a saying, it is hard to be a Jew. Truthfully, if one is a person of sincere devotion and of thinking conviction it must be even harder now to be a Christian. How are Christians to explain to themselves and to their children why and how they abandoned 1700 years of teaching, still unable to sense God in the world, and indulged their secret wish. Well, Wiesel says, that is their problem.

LISTEN TO THE VOICES

So there is the story of Kupishok and as I said, not unique at all. Not much of a story. Hardly any suspense. The moral of the story? Maybe this: You can live with your neighbors for over 300 years, but if you are Jewish and they are not, what can happen is that they may decide to kill you. And not just you but all your family; and not just your family but all your community; and not just your local community but all. Your continent’s community. We are all descendants of Kupishok, but we have no ancestors. No pictures, no letters, no names in a book. All of that was burned. The connection is broken. Shmerl Kacherginsky, the Vilna ghetto poet-partisan, cries for us

S’haben breges oikh di yamen,

S’haben t’fisot oikhet tsamen,

Nor tsu undzer peyn,

Kayn bis’l sheyn,

Kayn bis’l sheyn.

The seas have their shores,

Jails their fences,

But our anguish,

No glimmer, No bits of light.

We Jews are naïve. We keep telling ourselves that Judaism is a religion in celebration of life, and so it is. We don’t believe in death. Even when we were taken to the Pit, we didn’t comprehend. A Jewish kind of naivete – witness the study-house Jews who imagined Leon Trotsky as a Jewish brother who would redress the injustices done them; but no less – even after the Holocaust – their Communist sons and daughters, even more self-deceived, making of themselves the mindless functionaries of a Revolution that was not ultimately theirs. Try as they might to be true Communists when their usefulness to the natives ended, so were they. They went to the walls of the dungeons and basements of the Gulag, still professing their membership of all humanity.

So far as I know, Jews are the only ones who number among themselves such numbers of “universalists”. They still do. Universalism is the ultimate Jewish parochialism, and puts one into alliance with those who refuse to admit that it was Jews who were murdered at Babi Yar on Yom Kippur of 1941. The ultimate Jewish naivete. But perhaps naïve is not the right word. Maybe the right word is stupid. Maybe the truth is that many of us Jews, like all

the world, want the Jews dead. But God – the Mystery – doesn’t permit it. One cannot pretend to offer the answer to the Mystery, but what is one to make of the Jewish hunger for redemption so deep in our soul we cannot give up the dream? The mission. The covenant. The Mystery, the Mystery that doesn’t permit it. Kupishok is dead; its children dead, the music of trumpets sounding in their dying ears. But its few raggedy survivors, alive, are Jews; dead in a mass grave they are “citizens, victims of Hitlerish aggression.”

An example of that special Jewish naivete: In the New York Times issue of Sunday, August 20, 2939, page 15 column 4, “…800 Jewish refugees from Central Europe were caught this morning by the coast guards while attempting to land in Northern Palestine…” and “…arrested and placed in quarantine at Haifa pending the government’s decision whether they will be allowed to remain.” On the same page, dateline Nice, France, August 19 -- “More than forty Jewish refugees from Italy who crossed the border into France in the past few days are being held in Cannes and other Riviera towns for questioning by the police.”

Again, in the first column of that same New York Times page reporting from Geneva, the site of the twenty-first session of the World Jewish Congress, a speech by Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver of Cleveland, Ohio, “I…propose to the delegates to this congress that they do nothing which might bring Jewish people into conflict with the mandatory government. We are not yet confronted with finality…I am not unmindful of the plight of our poor refugees who are

trying to get into Palestine, but I am worried about the possibility of our making a colossal blunder at a time when circumstances do not warrant our taking such action.” The Jews who remained in Kupishok less than two years later were not the only innocents.

What of us descendants of Kupishok? What is to become of us? Can we American Jews maintain our heart without feeling Kupishok, without recognizing its uniqueness – the ordinariness of its horror? We are not listening to Emil Fackenheim who hears from Auschwitz: “Jews are forbidden to hand Hitler posthumous victories.” To say “no” to Kupishok is to say “yes” to Hitler and the trumpet-players. Dare we deny the Mystery and live without purpose, without a sense of Cosmos? What is to become of us, we who must undertake what was lost in Kupishok? Progeny of Kupishok, we have an obligation to listen to the voices of our father; we owe our lives to our children.

The rest, Elie Wiesel’s grandfather said to him, the rest is up to God.

SOURCES

Dawidowicz, Lucy S., The War Against the Jews 1933 -1945. New York, 1975.

Encyclopedia Judaica

Hilberg, Raul. The Destruction of the European Jews. New York, 1961.

Huchet-Bishop, Claire. Auschwitz: Beginning of a New Era? A collection of papers edited by Eva

Fleischner, 1974.

Littell, Franklin H. The Crucifixion of the Jews. New York, 1975.

Musmanno, Michael. The Eichman Kommandos. 1961.

New York Times. Editions of June 22 to July 4, 1941.

Oshry, Ephraim. Khurbn Lite. New York, 1951.

Return to Memory Stronger part 1

Return to Main Page of Memory Stronger

Return to Main Page