The Forest of Vanishing Stars(102)
When I thought about the guilt Aron has lived with his whole life—the guilt of surviving while so many others died—I wondered what his parents would have thought to know their youngest son has lived into his nineties. His very survival is a triumph over evil, and his whole life—as well as the existence of his three children, fourteen grandchildren, and thirteen great-grandchildren—is a testament to that.
During our conversation, Aron paused at one point and said, his voice trembling, “You have to remember one thing for the rest of your life: hardship teaches a person life.” I can’t think of a more important message as we emerge from the shadow of 2020, the year in which I wrote this book. I think many World War II novels remind us that there is always a light at the end of the tunnel, and that as a human race, we can all triumph over the darkness. But this year I needed to hear that—and to internalize it, to make sure it found its way into both my life and my writing—more than ever. To hear it from a survivor was even more impactful.
On a personal note, I’d like to add that much of the Jewish side of my own family, on my father’s side, actually hails from an area of eastern Europe not too far away from where The Forest of Vanishing Stars takes place—something I didn’t realize until my brother sent me a link to a family tree he was putting together on Ancestry.com. (Thanks, Dave!) It was amazing to discover that my great-great-grandparents—Rudolph and Rose Harmel—had in fact emigrated from Poland to the United States in August 1888, fifty-one years before Hitler’s army invaded their former homeland. Rudolph died in 1932, but Rose lived until 1941—long enough that she must have known of the horrors that were beginning to befall the people she’d left behind. I don’t know if I had distant relatives—perhaps sisters, brothers, or cousins of my great-grandparents—who were caught up in the Nazi terror, but I would imagine I did. It’s incredible to think about fate and how the decisions our ancestors made—mine’s decision to leave Poland in 1888, for example—affect us so much to this day.
In The Forest of Vanishing Stars, as in real life, many Jews in Poland made decisions that impacted the future, too. They stood up. They fought back. They survived. And when you think of the odds they faced in Poland, that’s truly incredible.
According to Yad Vashem, the world Holocaust remembrance center based in Israel, more than 3.3 million Jews lived in Poland on the eve of World War II—more than any other country in Europe. In fact, they made up 10 percent of Poland’s population, the highest percentage of Jews anywhere in Europe. According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, between 2.8 million and 3 million Polish Jews were murdered during the war. That’s somewhere between 84 percent and 91 percent of the entire Jewish population of the country.
Think about that for a moment. Approximately three million Jewish people were murdered in a single country. Jewish casualties in Poland far outweighed those in any other country during the war—and yet people somehow found a way to survive against those staggering odds. It’s incredible and inspiring, and as I spoke to Aron Bielski, I felt almost as if I were having a conversation with a real-life superhero. He was young during the war, and it was certainly his older brothers who did the most to build their society of salvation within the woods. But Aron played a role, too, and he’s still here to talk about it. What a gift to us all.
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I’d love to give you a few notes on the real historical basis of The Forest of Vanishing Stars. I played around slightly with a few dates and minor geographical details to make the story work, but everything was based on the real history of the area.
Chana’s family, whom Yona meets toward the beginning of the novel, fled from the Volozhin ghetto, just north of the Nalibocka Forest. Just like the other ghettos mentioned in the book, the one in Volozhin was real. In August 1941, more than three thousand Jews from Volozhin and nearby villages were moved into a tiny ghetto. They were often shot at random, such as during an October 1941 Aktion, during which three hundred Jews were brought, ten at a time, to be killed in a field just outside the ghetto. In May 1942, the Germans oversaw a mass execution, carried out by local collaborators, in which more than fifteen hundred Jews were shot dead and then incinerated in a field. Another eight hundred were rounded up and machine-gunned down in a building. In August 1942, three hundred Jews were burned alive. The ghetto was finally “liquidated” in 1943.
Aleksander’s group comes from the Mir ghetto, about fifty-five miles south of Minsk. There, the killings began early. On July 20, 1941, the Germans rounded up nineteen Jewish and three non-Jewish intellectuals and murdered them in the forest. In October and November of that year, another two thousand Jews were killed, and the remainder of the Jews in the area were moved into a ghetto. Jews there received a ration of just 4.4 ounces of bread each day. In May 1942, the surviving Jews were moved into the large, run-down Mir Castle, to which there was only one entrance, making it harder to escape. But a Polish Jew named Oswald Rufeisen managed to infiltrate the local police station as a German translator. He tipped off ghetto prisoners that a liquidation was coming—and he helped distract police while an escape took place. More than two hundred escaped into the forest, as did Rufeisen himself, who later converted to Catholicism, became a friar, and moved to Israel. The remaining 560 Jews in the ghetto were murdered in August 1942.
Zus’s group comes from the Lida ghetto, which was established in September 1941. In May 1942, around a thousand workers and their families were pulled aside, and the remaining Jews—5,670 of them—were murdered. Soon, Jews from other settlements were moved into the Lida ghetto, and in March 1943, there was another round of killings; some two thousand Jews were shot just outside town. The ghetto refilled with Jews from elsewhere once again, eventually numbering four thousand, and the ghetto was liquidated in July 1943, with the remaining prisoners sent to the Majdanek death camp.