My father describes how, as his congregation was being exterminated all around him, the rabbi threw off his “kerchief” and covered his head with it, as he would at prayer in the synagogue. “Suddenly”, my father writes, “he lifted his head to the skies and cried, ‘And thou, Lord of the Universe, sitting on high, see all this and art silent?’”
How striking that a rabbi should turn on his God and condemn Him. It’s not surprising that his faith was shaken to its core. The brutality of the Holocaust led some of us to conclude that God did not exist because He did not intervene. But in the charnel house of Tomaszów Mazowiecki, another rabbi, Emanuel Grossman, maintained that humans were to blame because God gave them the power of individual choice. Grossman had the same name as my paternal grandfather, although I’m not sure if he was connected to us by blood.
Reading the Yizkor book in Yiddish is a more powerful experience for me than the English version, translated by Morris Gradel, a gifted linguist who died in 2010. The Yiddish is more precise, and I hear the cadence of the words that were used at the time, reconnecting me to the agony of November 2, 1942, when my father heard Rabbi Grossman’s final pleas.
My father writes that as the rabbi walked with his family to the station, his “usual self-confidence had faltered, although his face showed no signs of the struggle that was going on inside him”:
He believed that our enemies would perish, but now his hopes had collapsed. But neither did he show his despair. He exhorted his children, “Go, my children, save your lives, but remember always to remain Jews and tell the world what the German murderers did to us”.
I don’t know whether the rabbi’s children survived. I doubt it. But my father took his words to heart and did his duty by bearing witness and relating in graphic detail the nature of the Nazis’ crimes in Tomaszów Mazowiecki.
My father is no longer here to tell that story. But I am. He passed the baton to me. I am speaking on behalf of Rabbi Emanuel Grossman and his family. Now I’m passing the baton to my own children and grandchildren.
The same day, after the deportation, the remaining Jews were ordered to assemble, according to my father’s notes. I don’t remember being there. But reading through my father’s account, it seems clear that the crowd of survivors from the ghetto must have included Mama and me. We were allowed to live because the Nazis deemed that we were still of some use to them. After forcing us to watch genocide taking place, the Germans compounded our distress by compelling us to clean up the massacre they had perpetrated. At gunpoint, we were forced to sanitize the scene of the crime to comply with the Nazi dictum: leave no witnesses, leave no traces.
“There were clearly distinguishable bloodstains in the houses — the blood of aged and ailing Jews, who had been unable or unwilling to leave their beds and who were shot on the spot”, writes my father in the Yizkor book. “On the tables were plates with soup the Jews did not have time to eat, glasses of tea they had not drunk”.
As a four-year-old, I couldn’t process the images that passed in front of my eyes. There’s no doubt that I was traumatized by the brutality of the sights I witnessed. But my heart aches for my father. I believe his torment was more profound. He saw the same war crimes as I did, and many more at closer quarters, but he understood much better than I could the magnitude of what had taken place. He had hoped that his position would allow him to save more of his family and friends. But instead, he had to stand by, helpless, as they were slaughtered in front of him. “Again, there were heartrending scenes”, he recalls:
The remaining Jews, fooled, robbed and despondent, looked vainly about for other members of their family, and did not know what had happened to them.
The Germans, who had declared that they would not split families, had deceived them in the cruelest fashion. After an evening of horror, the remaining Jews felt like branches torn from a tree full of life. A dreadful feeling of loneliness overwhelmed them.
How could they get through the coming night? How could they face the morning sun? Some of them were older, but most of them young. But in a trice, they had grown up. Now they were all orphans. All lonely and desolate.
According to the archives of the Jewish council, my father stopped being paid as a policeman from that day forward. But he and other members of the Jewish Order Service were compelled to dispose of the remains of those killed during the liquidation of the main ghetto. In all, about 250 corpses lay contorted in apartments, on cobbles and in the churchyard. The Jewish policemen were under constant German military escort as they removed the bodies of friends, relatives, neighbors and strangers alike, and buried them without ceremony in the Jewish cemetery of Tomaszów Mazowiecki.
Their skeletons lie there still. Entwined. Somewhere, beneath the mulch. Trampled underfoot. They have no headstones. But they are remembered. If you go there, look down and think of them. Maybe say a prayer that it should never happen again.
Chapter Six. The Block
Our world had shrunk. The surviving Jews of Tomaszów Mazowiecki were confined to four streets: Wachodnia, Pierkarska, Handlova and Jerozolimska. We were now prisoners in the small ghetto that was known as the Block. There were about 900 or so of us, including Mama, Papa and me. A barbed-wire fence sealed us in and separated us from the buildings that comprised the old, larger ghetto. We were guarded by Germans, Ukrainians and Poles. From their shoulders dangled the submachine guns that had irrigated the ground by St. Wenceslas Church with the blood of our people.
The northern end of Jerozolimska was the only official way in and out. It was the portal to the outside world. As we all now knew, from there, it was a two-mile walk to the rail tracks, and extinction.
“I guess there’s no way they would let us go back into our buildings”.
I overheard Mama whispering to Papa as we were marched back under guard to our new quarters.
“We can’t go back to the old buildings. I guess they’re going to kill us a different way”, she said.
The sound of steam engines and shunting cars in the middle distance provoked looks of concern among the adults. But for the time being, the normal railway schedule was restored. The trains weren’t for us. An eerie silence descended on the ghetto’s four streets. The wall of sound made by 15,000 people had blown away over the horizon in the direction of Treblinka. A sense of shock and collective depression descended over those still breathing.
Over the coming days and weeks, it became clear that those souls would never return. Our guards didn’t tell us about their fate. News filtered through because some Jewish craftsmen, such as carpenters and painters, were allowed to work outside the barbed wire, escorted to and fro by policemen.
What my father writes in the Yizkor book is important:
From time to time, a Polish railway worker, briefly coming across Jews outside the ghetto, would tell them that the deported Jews had first been taken to Malinka (a nearby town) and from there directly to annihilation!
And when their hearers returned to the ghetto and reported what they had been told by the Pole, no one wanted to believe them. They said it was just a joke by some anti-Semitic Pole. After all, such things were incredible for any sane person. Was it possible? How could such a thought occur? To burn living beings?!! To burn old people, women and children? No! No! No! Impossible!