They began rounding up Jews in the streets of the city and people disappeared. There were rumors of shootings. I completely refused to believe what I was seeing.
All the Zionist organizations still in the city were disbanded. We could forget Palestine. I decided to find my parents through the Red Cross and make my way to join them. On the way to the Red Cross center I was caught in one of the hunts for Jews and arrested.
From that first detention on thirteenth of July 1941 until the end of the war I faced death every day. There were many occasions when it might have seemed that I should have died, and yet every time I was miraculously saved. If a person can get used to miracles, I got used to them during the war. In July 1941 the miracles in my life were only beginning.
What do people mean when they talk of a miracle? Something nobody has ever seen before, which has never happened before? Something beyond the limits of our experience, which is contrary to common sense, which is so improbable or happens so rarely that there are no living eyewitnesses of such an event? If it suddenly snowed in Vilnius in the middle of July, would that be a miracle?
On the basis of my own experience I can say that the defining characteristic of a miracle is that it is performed by God. Does that mean miracles do not happen to nonbelievers? No. The way a nonbeliever thinks means that he will explain a miracle by natural causes, the theory of probability, or as an exception to the rule. For a believing person a miracle is intervention by God in the natural course of events, and the mind of a believer rejoices and is filled with gratitude when a miracle occurs.
I have never been an atheist. I began consciously praying when I was eight, and I asked God to send me someone who would teach me the truth. I imagined this teacher would be handsome, educated, and have a long moustache, rather like the president of Poland at the time. I never did meet such a teacher with a moustache, but for a long time the One whom I met and whom I call my Teacher talked to me precisely in the language of miracles. Before learning to understand this language, you had first to learn its alphabet. I started thinking about that after the first roundup when I and my friend were seized in the street.
The group of Jews who had been arrested were taken from the police station to chop firewood for a German bakery. For the first time in my life I saw two German soldiers beat a young man almost to death for chopping logs badly. My friend and I were barely able to drag him to the courtyard of the Lukiszki Prison, to which we were marched after a long day’s work. The courtyard was crammed with Jews, all men. They took all our possessions and documents and questioned us. When they asked what my training was I wondered whether to say I was a woodcutter or a cobbler but decided on the spur of the moment that I was a better cobbler than a woodcutter and answered accordingly. At that moment a miracle occurred. The officer shouted, “Hey, give Stein his belongings and documents back!”
I was taken to the stairs and a few others were brought, all of them cobblers. Cobblers, as we later discovered, were needed by the Gestapo because they had confiscated a large warehouse of leather from Jewish traders. The local German authorities decided to put it to good use, not sending it to Germany but using it to make boots for themselves. Of the one thousand people detained in that swoop, only twelve were cobblers. I was told later that all the others were shot, but I refused to believe it.
There was so much leather that the work lasted a long time. For the first six weeks they did not let us leave the prison, but then they gave us a pass with a Gestapo stamp and sent us home. We had to return each day to the prison workshop to make boots.
One day when I was going back home, a peasant offered me a lift on his cart. I did not realize at the time that my meeting this man, his name was Bolesław Rokicki, was itself another miracle. We know how many people have killing on their conscience, but he was one of those who saved lives. I understood very little at that time.
Bolesław lived on a farmstead two kilometers from Ponary. He told me some thirty thousand Jews had already been buried in the antitank ditches dug by the Red Army before it retreated. Mass shooting was going on around the clock. Again I refused to believe it.
Bolesław offered to let me move to his small farm, which he thought would be the safest place for me.
“You don’t look like a Jew, you speak Polish like a Pole. You don’t have ‘Jew’ written all over you. You can just say you’re Polish.”
I declined. I had a German pass with a stamp saying I was working as a cobbler for the Gestapo and thought that was sufficient protection.
A few days later, on my way back from work, I was again rounded up. The street was blocked and all the Jews in the crowd were forced into an inner courtyard, a dead end built of stone and with only one entrance through heavy metal gates. The roundup was being conducted by Lithuanian security guards in Nazi uniform and they were exceptionally brutal. They were unarmed but had heavy wooden truncheons and they made good use of them. I went to a Lithuanian officer, handed him my ID, and told him who I worked for. He tore up my precious pass and slapped me in the face.
All the Jews were herded into the courtyard and the gate was locked. The houses around the courtyard were empty, their inhabitants having already been expelled. Some people tried to hide in empty apartments, others went down to the cellars. I decided to hide, too, and found a cellar. Many houses in Vilnius had compartments in their cellars for storing vegetables. In the darkness I found a door but it was locked. I prized the planks apart and squeezed in. Instead of vegetables the little room was piled with old furniture. I hid there.
A few hours later trucks arrived. I heard orders shouted in German, and then Germans with torches appeared and started searching.
It was like a game of hide and seek, except that you would only lose once. Light fell on me through the cracks in the planks.
I heard a voice say, “The door here’s padlocked. There’s nobody else. Let’s go,” and the torch beam disappeared.
“Look though, there’s a gap in the planks,” someone replied.
I had never before prayed so hard to God.
“Are you joking? A child couldn’t squeeze through that.”
They left. I sat for an hour and then another in total silence. I had to get out somehow. My German document issued by the Gestapo had been torn up by that Lithuanian officer and all I had now was my school ID card issued in 1939. It gave no indication of nationality, only the name Dieter Stein, an ordinary German name. I tore the yellow star off my sleeve and decided my Jewish self would be left behind in the cellar. The person emerging would be a German and would behave like a German. No, a Pole. My father was German and my mother Polish, that would be best. And they had both died.
I went up and out to the courtyard where dawn was already breaking. I pressed against the walls of the houses like a cat and crept to the gate. It was locked and mounted so close to the stonework there was no way I could squeeze through the crack. The stones were laid close together and you would need a tool to prize them out. I had that tooclass="underline" a small cobbler’s claw hammer! Everybody had been searched as we came into the courtyard but the hammer in my boot had been overlooked. “It’s a miracle,” I thought, “another miracle.”
It took fifteen minutes for me to chip out two small stones. There was only a small space but it was big enough for me. Even now, as you can see, I’m not a big person, and in those days I did not weigh even fifty kilograms. I squeezed through the gap and found myself out in the street.