Note:
see photos from this trip here.
At the urging of my oldest son Marc, we took an ancestral visit
in July 2007 to trace our family’s roots. He said that since he
was a child, I would talk repeatedly about Nesvizh. So he
suggested that it was about time that we saw the family
birthplace with our own eyes. Thus father and son traveled to
Europe to see what we could find remaining of the Jewish shtetl
in Nesvizh where my parents and Marc’s grandparents once upon a
time came from.
Stories about the shtetl (a
Yiddish word meaning small town in Eastern Europe where Jews
lived alongside their Christian neighbors before World War II)
where our family came from in the “old country” were told to
us while growing up. To escape Russian persecution, mother
came to America with her family in 1910, and father came to
escape Polish persecution in 1926. They had both spent their
childhoods in the tiny East European shtetl called Nesvizh.
The shtetl name means “it’s not a swamp.”
Nesvizh
was formerly a Polish hamlet and is presently located in the
landlocked country of Belarus. It is sandwiched between
Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania and Latvia. Its
capital is Minsk.
Our journey began in Minsk
where our excellent guide-translator, Bella, met us. The drive to Nesvizh took
about two hours through the southern countryside where there were more
people riding bicycles than driving cars. A few peddlers set up roadside stands
selling mushrooms and potatoes for a few rubles. As we passed
forest after forest, it occurred to me that these forests were
the ideal hiding places
for World War II partisans attacking Germans and their
supplies.
My father’s brother, Pesah Szwejd (pronounced
Schweid) and sister, Penina Siderman, and their respective
families were living in Nesvizh when the Nazis invaded in 1941.
My heart skipped a beat as we
approached Nesvizh, founded in 1223. We passed farm after farm
and a mix of small pre-war shabby houses and post-war concrete
houses. There was no industry. It was Sunday and a fair, which
dates back to my ancestors’ times, was taking place. People
thronged in shops and markets despite the rain.
Was anything Jewish left of this shtetl to indicate that there
was once a vibrant Jewish community? Although we investigated
before our trip and found that there were no Jews left and
nothing remained, yet the question still plagued us.
Near the center of town, our guide showed us a structure called
“The Jew House,” which was formerly inhabited by Jewish people
and was now a pool hall and grocery.
To our delight the guide found the names of three Jews presently
living there, although they were not originally from Nesvizh.
They were a physician, a pensioner and a teacher, women who
settled there after World War II. Our guide made an appointment
for us to visit the teacher.
We were excited to interview
the teacher. Her name is Sofia Titova, who came as a youngster to Nesvizh in
1950 with her father who was formerly appointed by the
government to teach school. Sophia was following her father’s
footsteps.
We searched for signs of
Jewishness in her home and were pleasantly surprised. Sofia’s
daughter was at a university in Israel doing research on
synagogues. Also there were two pictures from Israel and at
least one book of Jewish content. Sophia was an excellent
hostess and an ambitious gardener. She lived across the street from the abandoned
Jewish cemetery, which we visited next.
Walking in the cemetery, we chanced upon one intact tombstone,
although others appeared to be scattered around face down. The
tombstone gave the name Jacob, son of Isaac Segal Getzog and
date of death as 1894, indeed a remnant of the lost Jewish
community.
After Marc and I delivered a heartfelt Kaddish, a man dressed in
uniform darted
across the
street and commented on our interest in the cemetery. He
explained that after World War II the Communist government gave
tacit approval to the
Christians
of Nesvizh to remove Jewish tombstones and monuments, and use
them as stones for their
masonry needs. He claimed responsibility for erecting the
tombstone from 1894.
He identified himself as the chief of the state police of
Belarus. He showed us what appeared to be the back of a second
tombstone on his own lawn half-hidden
by years of overgrowth. He
offered to bring a tractor on the following day in order
to move the tombstone to the
cemetery and place it next to the 1894 one. He said
he had been waiting for
someone to show interest in the cemetery. There were
other overturned tombstones in
the cemetery that he also offered to right. Marc
and I were elated.
On the following day, we met with 80-year old Galina
Kulakovska-Legostayeva, longtime resident of Nesvizh. She
recalled the Nesvizh ghetto uprising and said she had heard the
shooting on July 21, 1942 from the second sweep of the Nazi SS
Einsatzgruppen.
In the first sweep on October 30, 1941, Einsatzgruppen selected
585 skilled workers, forced them into a tiny ghetto, and
massacred the remaining 5,000 souls of Jewish Nesvizh.
When the skilled workers
selected realized that the Nazis planned a further selection of 30 crafts
people, they knew their end was near. So, they made a courageous decision. They
chose to fight the Nazis and their collaborators and not die like “sheep going to
slaughter.” The history of the ghetto documents this first Holocaust ghetto uprising
in which about 25 Jews escaped into the forests and joined the partisans.
Galina spoke of once meeting a
survivor from the ghetto.
Zobovitz Rescues Two
Brothers: Levi, Age 7 and Yehuda Neufeld, Age 10
According to a ghetto uprising
leader, Shalom Cholawski: “The parents kissed their children. Eyes filled
with tears. The children looked at them in sadness and
silence. We lifted the wires and the children slipped
underneath, setting out, alone,
barefoot. They looked back once. We followed them for about
two hundred meters, the fence between us, until they turned
and disappeared from our sight. We
stood tensely. Would they arrive safely? Would we see them
again? We didn’t hear
any cries or shooting, so after a long silence, we turned and
walked back to the ghetto. The children passed Albyenska,
Pilsudskigo [streets], and then reached the home of Zobovitz.”
“Zobovitz received us warmly,”
Yehuda told us. “We ate in their house and slept in the barn. The next day
the ghetto was in flames. Zobovitz consoled us, suggesting that our
parents might have fled to the forest.
The three daughters in the
house cared for us as kindly as our parents did. The food was good. What they ate,
we ate. The days were long, the nights even longer. We had
nothing to do. We didn’t know what to do with ourselves. I
already knew how to read, Levi did not. I read all the books
in the house.
We used to receive the
Belorussian newspapers, which were full of war news. Zobovitz knew the Russians
were advancing and told us, giving us hope. They sewed warm
clothes for us and supplied us with blankets. But despite all
that was provided, we
were not to be comforted. There was always that fear. Each
knock atthe door terrified us.
When the search for Jews
became more intense, Zobovitz had a relative from aneighboring
village bring a cart. We were placed in it and covered with
straw. The peasant drove us off. We were transported to a barn
several kilometers away. Wehid in the barn for twenty-four
hours, and on the following day, another peasant came and
brought us to the partisans in the forest.” (Cholawski, S.,
154, 155, 160, 180-182)
In the forest, the boys found
their place and behaved independently despite their emotional trauma.
Levi learned to read and write. Both studied mathematics and
geography. Yehuda learned to be proficient in Russian and
became a courier for the
partisans.
After the war, they returned
to Nesvizh and were adopted. They attended fifth grade. Together with their
adopted parents they moved to Germany. Then they immigrated to
Israel and studied at universities. Levi has died and Yehuda
has become a chief
aviation engineer in Tel Aviv.
In preparation for our meeting, Galina sat down
with a neighbor and they drew up a list of Jews they remembered
from their childhood days and the names of about 90 Jewish
businesses, but unfortunately she did not know our family, the
Szwejds and Sidermans. However, a couple of names she had
written on the list were familiar to us.
We bumped into an elderly redheaded
woman by the name of Sophia Ginsburg Loseva Klasvdias, who spoke
English and who had lived in the ghetto. She remembered that as
a child, she could not understand at the time why a familiar
Jewish family in the ghetto set fire to their house. She later
realized that the house created a huge smokescreen in an attempt
for the family to flee. Her parting words were, “So sad. Nothing
I could do.”
Later we joined the chief of state
police. As a person in high places he was able to “borrow” the
tractor. He moved the second tombstone to the cemetery. We were
hoping by shear coincidence that the stone would read our family
names of Szwejd or Siderman. But no, the stone belonged to a
different family instead, Levitz, and dated back to 1887. What a
find!
Following our discovery of two old Jewish tombstones in the
abandoned Jewish cemetery of the destroyed shtetl of Nesvizh,
Marc and I were “psyched.” We were
ready for our next move.
Although we originally had gone on our
journey without expectations of finding any vestiges of this
lost shtetl and of our family, Marc and I wanted to press our
luck further. What else remained in this tiny shtetl after 550
years of a rich Jewish heritage?
Jewish Nesvizh had flourished.
It was known for its Talmudic scholars, eight synagogues,
yeshiva, Hebrew and Yiddish schools, Zionist youth groups and
organizations. Judges from rabbinical courts of Poland and
Lithuania would meet there.
Jews spoke Yiddish and developed their own culture. They were
largely observant. They interacted with their Polish neighbors
in the marketplace, where they
operated businesses and played music at Polish weddings. But
none of this exists
any longer.
Following directions sent to
me by a friend of my late teenage cousin, Pini, who perished in the Holocaust,
we arrived at a house where we excitedly found a cut-out place
for a Mezuzah on
the right doorpost, the sign of a Jewish home of the past.
We had stumbled miraculously upon the
Mezuzah–less house
where my Szwejd family had lived peacefully before the Nazis
invaded.
Behind the Szwejd home stood my
Siderman family clapboard house with its fruit trees still
blooming 66 years after the SS Einsatzguppen arrived on their
first sweep.
Before the Germans, Nesvizh came under
Polish rule after World War I; the Soviets took control in 1939
and demolished Jewish communal life. Two years later, the
Germans captured the hamlet and began terrorizing the Jews,
looting their property and murdering them indiscriminately.
The
Germans issued stringent ordinances, destroyed the eight
synagogues and Jewish schools and desecrated the cemetery.
It
was a wet day on October 30, 1941, when all 5,000 Nesvizh Jews
were forced by
the SS Einsatzgruppen to assemble in front
of the marketplace across the town hall called “Ratusch,”
ostensibly for document inspection. Instead, a “selection” was
made of 585 skilled workers destined for a different fate: to
live temporarily in a tiny barbed-wire fenced ghetto, who
ultimately rose up against their
Nazi tormentors nine months later. The remaining Jews were split into two groups by armed SS who led
them in different directions. My aunt and uncle and their
children were among the martyred.
Marc and I decided to follow their paths. They
were the same roads my father’s brother and sister, uncle Pesah
Szwejd and aunt Penina Siderman and their families followed, and
we were walking in their footsteps. It was wet out and
reminiscent of the horrific day 66 years earlier. We walked on
the sidewalks as a defiant gesture against the former German
ordinance prohibiting Jews from walking on sidewalks. They had
been forced to walk in the streets, removing their hats before
German officials.
The first path led us through the Radzivil Castle park. We
chanced upon an ebony monument in front of the killing pit
dedicated to 1,500 peaceful citizens of the
Soviet Union (not Jews)
who were killed by the Germans. For some unknown reason the
remains were transferred by the Soviets to the Christian
cemetery.
We walked to the Christian cemetery
and located a white monument with a similar inscription
addressed to “Comrades!”; again, no Jewish names.
Afterward, we continued on towards the town of Snov, where we
tracked down a third memorial to 1,200 Soviet citizens, omitting
Jewish victims. We placed stones on those monuments and recited
Kaddish. Thus we saw evidence of anti-
Semitism along with the Soviet
liberation of Nesvizh in 1944.
The day’s journey ended at the Nesvizh
Historical Museum. We toured the galleries and in the last room
we made an amazing discovery. In a display case before our very
own eyes stood only one Torah roller,
Etz Hayim, with a few
sections of Torah parchment which was sheared off at the end.
The
Torah parchment was opened to the weekly portion of
Lech Lecha in Genesis.
That
portion was read
for the last time in a Nesvizh synagogue on the
Sabbath of October 25, 1941,
just five days before the destruction of the ghetto.
The Torah remnant was placed
upside down so that a person would have to literally stand on one’s
head in order to read it. I conjectured that the remnant pointed downward as if to
emphasize that the Jews of the shtetl were buried and all that remains of the
vibrant people is an unkosher Torah, Pasool.
It is indeed unfortunate that the Nazi vision of making Nesvizh
Judenrein and
relegating Judaism’s most sacred ritual symbol, the Torah, to a
museum where museum-goers could view what once belonged to an
“extinct race” came true in Nesvizh. However, there are a few
survivors,
Sh-ayrit
Haplayta, who live on in Israel and Australia. Though
their numbers have dwindled, they, their children and
grandchildren meet yearly in Israel on the anniversary of the
genocide for a memorial service to the Lost Shtetl and to
proclaim
Am Yisroel Chai,
the Jewish people lives!
There once was a shtetl called Nesvizh which is no longer. No
native Jews live there now. All that remains of a Jewish
connection are Soviet monuments not inscribed to Jewish
victims., two old Jewish tombstones, a so-called “Jew House,” a
“Prayer House,” and one Torah fragment.
