Black Earth(128)

Sometimes men lost their own children, and missed them, and did something about it. This was how Rachela Koch and her two daughters survived. The Koch family had lived before the war in Ko?omyja, a city in Galicia where almost no Jews survived the war. Rachela and her two girls tried to escape the shooting actions by fleeing to a bunker. They were the last three in and so got the worst place, in the darkness and fetidity of the very deepest hole. As a result, they escaped the shooting when the hideout was found.

After climbing out, the three of them awaited death, in grief and misery, at the side of the road. A passing Pole, Micha? Federowicz, recognized them as Jews, as most Poles could with most Jews most of the time. He asked them why they were courting death so openly; they expressed their resignation. He took all three of them in, the mother and the two daughters, and treated them as if they were his own. His three children, he told Rachela and her daughters, had been taken away by the Germans. Micha? must not have been a young man, and these must have been grown children, since he regarded not only Rachela’s daughters but also Rachela herself as a child. “As a protest,” he told them, “it would be right and good to take in three other children.”

Women lost children, and the absence was felt by those closest to them. Ewa Krcz, for example, a mother in a village not far from the Polish town of O?wi?cim, lost her daughter Genia during the war. She was inconsolable. Her little boy knew how he could help. Nearby was the complex of camps and killing facilities that the Germans had built around the Polish military base at O?wi?cim: Auschwitz. Here was a place where, at war’s end, there were many children who desperately needed care.

The last major transports to Auschwitz were of the Jews of Hungary, most of whom were murdered, but some of whom were still working as slave laborers when the camp was closed. The adults were marched in horrible conditions toward Germany, the children left behind. Many of the boys and girls were already orphans; others were becoming orphans as surviving parents fell behind on the death marches and were shot. Some were too young to know their own names. Ewa’s son, at his own initiative, walked into Auschwitz and chose a two-year-old girl who he thought would please his mother. The child was very ill, but Ewa nursed her back to health and raised her. Later the girl would seek her birth parents in Hungary. She did not find them.

Childless couples did not lose children, but they sometimes found them. A Jewish girl from Nowograd-Wo?yńsk in Volhynia survived the mass shooting in a trench where her mother and sister were murdered. She ran from hut to hut in the forest, and finally found shelter with a young woman. There the girl was beaten so long and brutally that the neighbors complained of the noise and told her to seek shelter somewhere else. She finally met an older Ukrainian couple, Marko and Oksana Verbievka, who seemed sympathetic and who listened to her story: her life, the pit, the shootings, the flight, the beatings. They cried as they listened to her. And then Oksana said: “Be at peace, little child, forget all this; you will be a daughter to us, we have no children, everything will be yours.”

And then, after a moment: “But you won’t abandon us later, will you?” The girl stayed with Marko and Oksana for the rest of the war, and then left them.

—

The words of Oksana and Marko, Ukrainian peasants, convey the sadness of childlessness, the inevitability of aging, the desire to transcend death through posterity, but also the simple and present need for help on a farm. This was an age of agriculture. These eastern reaches of interwar Poland, today western Belarus or western Ukraine, were still almost entirely agrarian. The farming was without machinery, requiring intense animal and human labor. The Great Depression had hit hard and lasted long in this part of the world, separating farmers from markets, turning them back to self-sufficiency. Economics was more about labor than about exchange—about producing enough so that humans and animals could survive the winter to produce again the next summer. There was usually enough manpower to go around; thanks to the international immigration limitations of the 1920s and 1930s, there had in fact been too much. This would change under German rule.





In the invasion of the Soviet Union of 1941, which was launched from precisely these territories, the Germans had taken many of the horses, since even the army of the famed Blitzkrieg moved chiefly by horsepower. When Operation Barbarossa did not go as planned, and the Germans had to send millions more of their own young men to the front, they replaced the lost labor in Germany by taking men and women from eastern Europe. At first this was by recruitment, and then by impressment, and finally in murderous campaigns. As millions of Poles, Ukrainians, Belarusians, and Russians were brought to Germany, the country became more Slavic in its population than it had been since the Middle Ages. This left parts of eastern Europe starved for labor, and countless families desperate for help in the pastures and fields. Hundreds of Jewish children, perhaps a few thousand, survived because peasant families needed labor. Most of them were orphans.