Black Earth(129)

Noema Centnewschwer, from the Bia?ystok region, was about ten when the Germans invaded and the mass killing of Jews began. She worked at seven homesteads in the countryside before she found one where she could stay. It was a large farm where the children were too small to work and where there was only one farmhand. “After a few days,” she remembered, “they sensed that I was Jewish, but they let me stay anyway. They weren’t kind, they brought up my Jewishness, but they didn’t let me go hungry.” Chawa Rozensztejn was from the same part of the world, from the town of ?om?a. She survived the pogrom of Jews by Poles in the town in 1941 and then the clearing of the ghetto in 1942. At the age of six, she made her way alone to the surrounding villages. As a nine-year-old, she recalled that the peasants she found were “friendly enough when I worked conscientiously.”

Szyja Flejsz was a boy of about Noema’s age from Volhynia. He hid in several villages and then made for the woods with some other boys. He worked for a time as a shepherd, then followed advice to go to Woronówka, a small settlement inhabited only by Poles. During the Soviet period in 1940, the NKVD had deported two villagers. The Germans assumed control in 1941. By the time Szyja arrived in early 1943, the surrounding woods were the site of the partisan war between Soviets and Germans. By day, as he remembered, everyone tried to keep peace with the Germans, and by night with the Soviets.

Szyja was taken in by Zygmunt Kuriata. Of some forty-two huts in Woronówka, twenty-two belonged to members of the Kuriata family, which perhaps created a sense of trust. One of the two people deported from the village by the NKVD had been a member of the family, but Zygmunt seems not to have drawn any specious conclusions about Jews and communism. Zygmunt knew that Szyja was a Jewish orphan and treated him well. He wanted Szyja to learn prayers, perhaps to help him blend in, since forced recital of the Lord’s Prayer was one way Christians tested Jews; or perhaps to save his soul. Perhaps neither, or both. But Szyja thought of his murdered parents: “My father was a Jew, my mother was a Jew, and I want to be a Jew.” Kuriata received this with equanimity: “A Jew is a Jew, he does not want to pray.”

In 1943 in Volhynia, a third force entered the partisan war. Ukrainian nationalists, in these extreme conditions, were able to establish their own partisan army. In the first months of the year, many of the Ukrainians who had been serving the Germans as auxiliary policemen went to the woods and joined the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA). This formation emerged as a result of the triple occupation of Volhynia and other lands inhabited by Ukrainians that had been part of Poland until 1939. The Soviet occupation had destroyed legal Ukrainian political parties and discredited the radical Ukrainian Left. Then the German occupation offered thousands of young Ukrainian men—some of whom had already been serving the NKVD as militiamen and assisting in the deportation of Poles and others—training in methods of killing Jews and others. Then the anticipated return of Soviet power, represented in late 1942 and early 1943 by the Soviet partisans, brought these policemen and others to the woods, some of them as Soviet partisans, others to the UPA.

The commanders of the UPA, Ukrainian nationalists, meant to resist the Soviets and establish a Ukrainian state, but their immediate task in early 1943 was the ethnic cleansing of Poles. In a number of cases, this meant the death of Jews who had taken shelter with Polish families; in at least one case, a Jew who had a good hiding place rescued a Pole from Ukrainians. In 1943, Poles and Jews in small settlements such as Woronówka were amidst a three-sided German-Soviet-Ukrainian partisan war, and in an impossible position. In June, the Germans set fire to Woronówka as punishment for its supposed support of the Soviet partisans. One member of the Kuriata family was burned alive. The inhabitants who remained eked out a miserable existence among the ruins, the forest, and neighboring villages. They were repeatedly attacked by the Ukrainian partisans of the UPA, who burned down the last building in the village in November. Each time the UPA attacked, Szyja fled to the woods with his Polish family. In summer 1944, when regular Soviet forces arrived, the NKVD completed the task of ethnic cleansing that its Ukrainian nationalist enemy had begun. People of Polish and Jewish origin were registered and deported west, beyond the restored Molotov-Ribbentrop border, to a Poland that was itself being shifted to the west. The last time the Soviets had been in control, in 1939, they had deported people to the Gulag according to class criteria; this time they deported people by ethnic criteria to the country where they were thought to belong.

All of the surviving residents of Woronówka went west, and the locality, battered by the first Soviet occupation, then by the German occupation, then by Ukrainian partisans, and finally by the return of Soviet power, ceased to exist. Zygmunt Kuriata and his wife registered Szyja as a member of their family, and the three of them were transferred to distant Silesia, to lands that Poland was allowed to take from Germany after the war. Many surviving Polish Jews were resettled to Silesia after they were expelled from the lands of eastern Poland that were claimed again by the Soviet Union in 1945. So it was there, after the war, at the age of sixteen, that Szyja again met Jews. He decided to leave his Polish family and return to Jewish life. Zygmunt was clearly restraining emotions: “If you want to go, we won’t hold you back; if you want to stay, we won’t make you leave.” Zygmunt and his wife cried when Szyja left them.