A Time in the Life of Israel Szapiro #129564

 

A TIME IN THE LIFE
OF
ISRAEL SZAPIRO
#129564

As told to: Howard Shaff & Audrey Shaff

 

A TIME IN THE LIFE
OF
ISRAEL SZAPIRO
#129564

As told to: Howard Shaff & Audrey Shaff © Copyright 1988 by Howard Shaff all rights reserved ISBN 0-932195-05-9 Cover by:
Amy Shaff

Permelia Publishing
Box 650
Keystone,South Dakota 57751

          A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro

"In Modern Times, Satan disguised himself as a Nazi: There is no difference.

But in spite of everything Satan could do, Jewish faith remained firm."

Rabbi Chaim Pearl
"Sacrifice of Abraham Reflected in Modern Record."
Intermountain Jewish News....September 13,1985

SON: "If there is a god how could there be Nazis?"

MOTHER: "Tell him how come there were Nazis."

FATHER: "Tell him how come there were Nazis? I don't even understand how a can opener works."

HANNAH HANAH AND HER SISTERS
Woody Allen movie...1986

  A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro

My name is Irving Shapiro.

I am a businessman living in Gering, Nebraska.

I was born Israel Szapiro in Meidzyrzec, Poland on April 15, 1923.

My parents were Hershel and Mala Szapiro.

Abraham was my younger brother.

Meyer Ruzal was my grandfather.

He was one of the most important men in both our Jewish community and the business world.

Grandfather Ruzal owned real estate in Warsaw and a prosperous lumber business in Meidzyrzec. He also owned the house there where we lived. The house had four apartments.

Our rooms were on the ground floor right next to my grandparent's. My mother's two sisters and their families lived upstairs in the other two apartments.

All of them died in the gas chambers of Treblinka and became ashes in the fire pits, all except my brother, Abraham.

I do not know what happened to him. We were taken together on the last transport, on the day that Meidzyrzec became "Judenrein", free of Jews.

They took us to the Majdanek Concentration Camp.

We were there together, for several weeks and then Abraham was gone. I went to see him one night and 2   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro could not find him. The men in his barracks told me he had been selected the night before for a shipment to G-d knows where. The Nazis never told a prisoner his destination. They just forced us into the boxcars like we were cattle and sent us away. It was one more way for them to terrorize us, to keep us on edge, worried and bewildered.

So Abraham just disappeared. I have never found a trace of him. Not a word, not a clue, nothing to prove he ever existed. Still I search for him, not because I have hope, but because I must.

It is hard to make comparisons between life as it was when I was growing up in Meidzyrzec and life after the Nazis came and destroyed everything including us.

Childhood was a time of joy. Ours was a happy home. We lived a rich, full life. Dark clouds may have been hanging over our heads, death may have been close at hand, but we did not know it, and we, the children especially, dreamed as children do everywhere of a future filled with achievement, adventure and success. We expected to grow up and take our place in the community and maybe even the world we knew existed outside Meidzyrzec.

My grandfather owned a thriving lumber business that employed many people and did business all over Europe. 3   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro My father and my uncles worked for him. They were all men of high standing in both the Jewish and the Polish community and in the small besmedrish, our neighborhood shul that was only a few doors from our house.

There was a wonderful old eighteenth century synagogue in Meidzyrzec, but it was a twenty minute walk from our house on Lubelska Street, all the way past the downtown marketplace square which was ringed with permanent stores and which filled on Thursdays when the farmers came to town and turned it into an open air market. That was a fine walk in spring or fall when many of the neighbors walked with us, but it was a long way on a cold winter morning or evening.

It was especially hard for my father because he suffered from arthritis so we went there only on special occasions, if a famous rabbi my father wanted to hear was going to speak or a friend had a reason for inviting us.

That synagogue is vivid in my memory. It always seemed like a holiday when we went there. We dressed in our very best clothes and my mother made sure everything about us was just right because we would be meeting strangers.

The synagogue had heavy wooden doors leading into a large lobby with a mosaic floor of brown tiles that were set in a random pattern. For some reason that floor 4   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro always seemed damp no matter what the season. I remember the dampness especially and the way my father would shake his head, when we stood there waiting to go to our seats inside. He believed, like everyone else, that the dampness could give you rheumatism and he felt it made his arthritis worse.

Inside the synagogue there were seats for about five hundred people with the raised platform, we call the bemah, in the center and the ark for the sacred Torahs against the back wall. Later the Nazis came and turned the synagogue into a house of murder and torture. They used that beautiful building as a stable and a prison for hostages.

They put people from the ghetto in there who were dying of typhoid. My father caught the sickness and they put him there to die with the others. He survived, but only to die later in the gas chamber at Treblinka. I wonder if he thought about the dampness.

Because I was the oldest I went to help my father. The people were lying there, in dirty straw that had been thrown on the floor. They were frightened. The dead and the dying were all there together. There were a few Jewish doctors trying to help, but there were no nurses, because before the war very few Jewish women went into professions.

5   A Time In The life Of Israel Szapiro

It is hard for me to think about that synagogue. It is an ache in my heart. I can still see the ruined building and hear the screams of my neighbors who were tortured there. The Nazis tore holes in the roof, desecrated the ark, burned our Torahs and killed many, many Jewish hostages in the damp lobby. They turned our house of prayer into a place of murder and torture and laughed at our tears.

I have read that the shell of that shattered building survived the war and was rebuilt. It is a synagogue again, but I ask myself, "How can it rid itself of the ghosts? How will it regain its soul? Where are the Jews to worship in it?"

All the people I knew and grew up with are ashes in the winds now. Before the Nazis came there were four million Jewish people in Poland. Now, I am told, there are maybe a few thousand scattered across the country. Most of the rest became smoke and ashes in the crematoriums. Those of us who survived could not bring ourselves to return to a place where the very air was poisoned by hatred and death.

I have been told there are even some Jews in Meidzyrzec today, maybe a few hundred out of what was once more than eighteen thousand. I see the ones who are there as ghosts, returning, not to live, but because 6   A Time In The life Of Israel Szapiro they could not find the energy or will to try and live. They returned to the only thing they remembered even if nothing of what was in their minds and hearts remained .

So much crowds together in my mind. The memories are like a kaliadescope, bits and pieces falling over each other, forming patterns all wanting to come out of me at once.

I grew up in a loving, sheltered atmosphere, loved and cared for by my parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, neighbors and everyone else in our community. Everyone knew everyone. All the children were taught to respect and listen to their elders.

Our house on Lubelska Street was the center of my world.

It was my mother's domain. Even though my last image of her is the agony of watching her being herded into a boxcar heading for the Treblinka death camp, I still remember her as a robust, laughing, bustling woman.

In most of my memories of my mother I see her in her kitchen. I can see her now, cooking, baking, getting ready for shabbath, putting vegetables up in jars, boiling jelly and jam, wiping her hands on her apron, giving me a pinch or a pat, smiling her special smile and telling me stories. She was always telling me stories. It was her 7   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro way to teach me about life.

Sometimes she became angry with me. I was full of life, sometimes too full and got into mischief. I can still see her waving her finger and warning me that I was going to get it when my father got home, but I never worried. My father was not the kind of person who beat his sons and my mother could never stay angry. I only had to be good for a little while and she would start smiling again and reward me with cookies and a glass of milk from the pitcher on the counter.

Our house was filled with the heady odor of the spices my mother kept hanging in the kitchen. They mingled with the tantalizing, hearty aromas coming from the pots and kettles that were always simmering on the stove, bubbling, sputtering, sending up little jets of steam and a hint of what we would have for supper.

There were times in the camps when I lay in the filthy straw on the wooden plank bunk I was forced to share with too many others, so hungry I did not think I could endure another hour much less live until morning. Then the image of that kitchen would come into my mind and stay with me until I somehow found the courage, or the anger to force myself to go on.

When I think back to those days and all the joys I think mostly of my mother in the kitchen and I think of 8   A Time In The life Of Israel Szapiro the food and the activity, but best of all I remember the stories she told while she worked.

My mother fired my imagination with tales of Jewish history, biblical heroes and the folklore of our people: David, Solomon, the Macabees. I climbed the mountain with Moses, waited while he listened to the words of G d and received the tablets with the Ten Commandments. I caught my breath and shuddered when he smashed them against the rocks.

She told me about the Bal Shem Tov and the other Rabbis who were revered by our people. Because of my mother being Jewish has been real to me from my earliest recollection. My Jewishness is a part of my being that I cannot question anymore than I can question sleeping or breathing.

Whenever mother went shopping I went along. When I was old enough to go alone it became my job to go to the grocery store. It was just a few doors down the street, but to me it was still an adventure I loved.

Mother would tell me what she needed, or, if there were too many items for me to remember she would write a list I would give to the grocer. It made me feel grown up to be trusted and the store was such a wonderful place to explore that I wanted to stay there for hours.

9   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro

It was filled with pungent odors of dried fish, meats, fruits and grains from all over the world. There were dozens of burlap sacks with the sides rolled down. There were open wooden crates with strange pictures and writing on the sides. It was in the grocery that I got my first inkling that there was more to the world than our town, our neighborhood, but it was not an idea I was ready or willing to accept. It was enough for me to allow my imagination to wander just a little and then return to the warmth and security of my own home.

I would do my exploring while the grocer put together my mother's order; a half pound of this, a slice of that, just a pinch of something special. Then I would watch him he wrap everything in paper, add up the amount owed and put it down in the big ledger under our name on our page.

No one but strangers paid cash on the spot and there were few, if any strangers buying at our store. On collection day the grocer brought his ledger to the house. He would sit and have a glass of tea while mother caught up on all the neighborhood news then my mother and the grocer would settle the account. I never figured out which was more important to them both, the visiting or the settling.

Those were the days before refrigeration so the grocer 10   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro sold only dried foods that would keep. Perishable foods were brought to us daily by the peasant women who peddled the produce and dairy products from their small farms, door to door or sold from stalls in the open market.

My mother stored some vegetables in the root cellar that had been dug out below the house when my grandfather had it built. To get there you had to go into the hallway and down through the trap-door. Everybody in the house used that storeroom. I loved to go there with my mother. It fascinated me because winter and summer it was always cool and everything was so neat and colorful. There was a sense of being in a place that was timeless, that had been and would always be.

So many wonderful memories come back to me when I think about that house on Lubalska Street. Most of them are connected with food because my mother was in the kitchen so much and because, I think, it was those memories that kept me going those bad days in the camps and on the marches when I had nothing to eat and was starving.

We had no indoor plumbing in the house on Lubelska Street. The outhouse was in the back yard. At night we kept a ceramic pot under the bed. Water for drinking, cooking and washing came from the town well. A man 11   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro brought it around in a tank mounted on a horse drawn cart and carried it in buckets to the barrel that stood outside the kitchen door. When we needed water we brought it into the house by the pitcher or pail, depending on how we were going to use it.

Milk was delivered fresh each morning by a peasant woman who filled our jug from the large goatskin sack she carried over her shoulder. The milk was raw and had to be boiled before we could drink any, but it was creamy and delicious after it cooled.

My mother bought eggs, cheese, vegetables, fruits and kosher meat from the stalls in the open market. Going to the market was like a holiday. When I was small as soon as I saw my mother pick up the market basket I would run to get my coat.

My mother baked most of our bread at home along with cakes and cookies for all the holidays and the two braided chalah we needed for the shabbath meals every week. There was a bakery in town, but they were mostly wholesale, baking for the groceries or to sell from the small carts that the street vendors used when the weather was nice.

Because my grandfather's lumber business was large we were considered "well off". This showed in a lot of little ways in the style of our living. Most of the houses 12   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro in town were heated by small stoves set in the middle of the room, but we had a huge stove set in a four-sided column of ceramic tile that picked up heat and sent it into all the rooms.

The tiles were shiny and covered with designs and patterns in many colors. They gave me a feeling of being rich and secure even when I was too young to know what that meant. I knew such chimneys of tile were never found in the homes of the poor.

I remember so many things about that tile chimney. In the winter, when my father came home from work at the sawmill he would stand with his hands behind him and backed up as close as he could so he could soak up the heat while my mother told him about the day.

In those years parents worried about their children getting scarlet fever. They thought that you increased the chances of getting sick it if you stayed in the city during the summer.

That was one reason we always went to the country. Another was my father's arthritis. He thought mineral baths would cure, or at least ease his pain.

Usually my parents chose a place up in the mountains, or near them in the foothills. They tried not to be more than a day's journey from Meidzyrzec. Depending on what was available they would take a small cottage 13   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro or a few rooms in a farmer's house. The Polish farmers in our part of the country always built huge homes so they would have rooms to rent to city people in the summer.

Life in the country was different. For some reason all the mothers felt compelled to stuff their children with food. Their summertime goal was to make each of us gain ten pounds at least. It seemed to be a matter of honor.

Breakfast was always at eight oclock. We ate herring, sour cream with fresh vegetables, fried eggs and heavy slices of bread thick with butter or cheese that we washed down with tall glasses of rich country milk. Then, hardly able to walk we all went out to play, only to be called back in mid-morning for a snack, then lunch, a nap and another snack before the evening meal.

Everything about our summer lifestyle was relaxed. We took long walks in the woods to enjoy flowers, trees, the country grasses, birds and the other creatures that were not a part of our city life.

We were allowed to run around most of the time in old clothes. Our mothers did not concern themselves too much with housekeeping and making us look just right as they did in the city.

When my father joined us on weekends I went with 14   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro him to the mineral springs and hot baths. I enjoyed being with him, but not as much as I enjoyed having mother practically to myself all week.

Our rented rooms required little housekeeping. We usually shared the kitchen with the other families and that limited my mother's time in front of the stove. Somehow, in the country, she managed to feed us twice as much, while spending less time in the kitchen. The time she saved was spent with my brother and me.

So in the summers I also learned much about life from mother's stories and away from the ritual of the besmedrish I was able to think about what it meant to be Jewish and what I would be when I was a man.

In the country our religious life was less formal. We went to services on Friday night and Saturday, but not in a shul. The services were held in the family room of the house and was only for us and the other families. We said the required prayers, but, it was not like it was at home. There everyone knew everyone else and was interested in what had happened to them, but with the strangers in the country, when the prayers were finished everyone said something polite and we went our way.

It all seems like a wonderful dream when I look back on those early years, even though I realize there were some bad times with the good. I was loved and loving. 15   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro I was encouraged to think, feel, ask questions about my roots, my heritage or anything else that interested me and to share my dreams. I was brought up knowing I was going to take my place in the world, that I was a Jew and that being one was a good thing.

Meidzyrzec was a fine place to live. The mostly Jewish population in the 1920's and early 1930's was just under twenty thousand. I was a Jew in a Jewish world, so insulated and loved, so protected in the community and the way of life my parents had created for me that I had no idea of the reality of the monstrous world that surrounded and threatened us.

There I was, in the center of a volcano, so sheltered I never felt the heat. I was a victim before I knew there was any danger.

Maybe that sounds foolish. You could ask, "How could that be?" After all I certainly had heard all about pogroms. My father and grandfather told me stories of Jews being murdered by mobs, but the people they spoke about seemed far away and from a different time. There was no way to connect what I was hearing with the civilized world of Meidzyrzec in the 1930's.

Later, we also heard the stories that were coming out of Germany about this raving madman, Adolph Hitler and the horrible cruelties he was inflicting on the German 16   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro Jews.

Our elders talked about what was happening when they gathered in front of the besmedrish after services. Someone would say he had a letter from a cousin in Germany and they would shake their heads while he spoke in whispers and told about atrocities that should have been shouted from the rooftops.

But what if they had? What could we, as a people, have done? After all we were brought up to believe we were all links in a chain forged by centuries of faith and tradition. Such links from such a chain are hard to break when the threat is intangible and there is no easy escape. How else could we view leaving Poland, the only home we had ever known? It would be breaking with everything we held dear. It was too hard a thought to even contemplate.

Yet we were not ostriches hiding our heads in the sand. There were endless discussions in our family, between my father and my uncles, in the early 1930's.

I can remember them even though I was still very young. The men talked about the people who had emigrated to America at the turn of the century, how millions had made the journey before the quotas stopped them in 1924. The thinking was that if the danger became real America would drop the quotas and let us in 17   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro once again. Until then, they believed, they were safe, or at least that is what they told each other.

The talk was endless, but inevitably they reached the same question every time, how do you pack up a life and move? We were people of substance. We were well off. We had roots and standing in the community. Some individuals did leave, but not in any great number. For most it was talk, talk in an endless circle.

I remember the prince who lived in Meidzyrzec. He lived in a castle right in the center of town that had been in his family for untold generations . His estate was not that large by the time I came along, but my grandfather told me it once had covered miles and miles. Wars, depressions and political changes had reduced it until all the prince owned was the castle in the center of Meidzyrzec, some timber land and a distillery for making vodka from the potatoes.

My grandfather bought most of the timber he used in his lumber business from the prince. They were not friends because they came from separate worlds, but they had a good business relationship.

I remember, late one night, there was a knocking at the gate. It woke the whole house. It was one of the prince's servants with a sack filled with jewelry that belonged to the prince's wife. The prince needed a loan, 18   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro he said, and had sent the jewelry as security.

My grandfather went to the safe in the big closet that almost filled his bedroom and took out the money. He refused to take the jewelry because my grand- father realized that no matter what, it would be an affront to a man like the prince if he had to leave security. He knew that the loan would be paid back faster as a debt of honor.

Most of those days and years of my childhood flow together and it is hard to recall when something in particular happened, but I still remember the sad day my grandmother became ill. I was worried so I kept asking questions until the rest of the family decided to send me to stay with other relatives.

When I was brought back to the house several days later my grandmother was gone.

The mystery of it all bothered me for a long time. I missed her, but life went on. I asked my mother where my grandmother was, but I did not understand her answer. I noticed whenever I tried to make her tell me she started to cry, so I stopped asking even though it made no sense to me. I guess that was one of my first real lessons in life.

It was not too long after grandmother died that my grandfather married a widow from Warsaw and brought 19   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro his new wife and her daughter to live with us on Lubelska Street.

My mother and her sisters did not like this woman who was suddenly in their mother's place. They made their feelings so obvious that my grandfather took his new family and went to live in Warsaw. I was saddened because my grandfather had always treated me as if I were special.

He felt a boy was never too young to study the Gemorrah, the interpretation of the law. When I was still small he started paying me three zlotys a week to spend my afternoons at the besmedrish studying.

I went faithfully, but not just for the money. I loved to study and enjoyed listening to the scholars. Still, three zlotys was three zlotys.

When I was old enough three zlotys was enough to take a girl to the movies, buy her an ice cream and still have some money left.

Movies were the most popular attraction in Meidzyrzec for all ages. At first the films were American made with Polish sub-titles. Then when the talkies came out the films had dubbed in Polish voices.

I lived a busy life. I played all kinds of sports with my friends when we were not in school or at the besmedrish. and we did the same things most boys do as 20   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro they grow up. We learned to smoke at an early age by sharing puffs on a cigarette when one of us managed to find one. I do not think any of us enjoyed them, but it was fun to sneak off and hide somewhere and do something daring.

School was the center of my life because it was so intertwined with my family and my home. Our community was proud of many things, but revered biblical scholarship above all else and all us young people tried to learn because we wanted the respect of our elders. We wanted to make our parents proud and we wanted to know about being Jewish. It was not that we questioned what we were, not that we doubted. what we were being taught. We could not imagine being anything else, but we also knew there were all kinds of Jews, pious and not so pious, the ones in the big cities that our parents said disdainfully, were "enlightened" and we knew what kind our parents wanted us to be just from the way they said it.

And all the time the hate-mongers and madmen were preparing to seize control. Anti-Semites in Poland and other countries were working their way into office. Hitler was writing Mein Kampf and beginning his take over of Germany.

But life at 65 Lubalski Street went on. My grand-father 21   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro was living in Warsaw with his new family and taking care of his various business interests while my father and uncles were running the lumber business.

My father was a religious man. He wore his yarmulka, prayed three times a day, no matter what and observed all the holidays, even those considered minor. He brought Abraham and me up to be Jewish, but he never insisted we wear yarmulkas, or made any other religious demands beyond those that were the accepted customs of the neighborhood such as observing the shabbat.

Perhaps he made no demands because he could not understand what was happening to his world. Maybe he felt he was failing us. He could have been questioning his values and practices as the storm clouds gathered. He must have been questioning his own faith even as he prayed. I am sure he wanted Abraham and me to develop our own inner resources so that we might survive whatever lay ahead.

We never talked about such things.

I never asked him.

I will never know.

I went to school six days a week and lived my life.

The school was so close to our house I would wait until I heard the bell ring before taking my lunch box and heading out the door.

22   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro

Our classes started early in the morning, about a quarter after eight, and continued until two in the afternoon with only a short recess for lunch.

After regular school I went to religious classes at the besmedrish and twice a week I went back to regular school in the late afternoon to study language. After Hitler came to power in Germany German was no longer taught as a part of the regular course of study. It was replaced by English and French, but you could go after school for German. That was how I learned to speak the language. That knowledge probably saved my life.

On Fridays school ended early so we could get ready for shabbat, the holy day that began at sundown. Our house, was always neat and clean, but it was given a special going over for the weekly holiday. Mother would start in the morning as soon as everyone was out of the house.

I enjoyed the weekly ritual. The whole house had a festive air and it filled with the delicious, savory aroma of the chulent, in the big black iron pot, that was simmering on the stove from early morning.

To make the chulent mother started with water, kishka, potatoes, a brisket, and her own mixture of special spices. She let it simmer all day until just before sundown. Then we carried the pot to the local bakery. 23   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro There the edge between the lid and the pot was sealed with moistened black bread pressed along the edges to hold in all the flavors and it was put in the oven, that was still hot to keep warm until the next day. This was in keeping with the Jewish law and tradition of not working on the Shabbat so the holiday could be devoted to prayer. We interpreted the law very strictly. Even carrying the chulent once the holiday began was prohibited.

In the late afternoon we all took our baths, one at a time, in the big wooden tub that mother filled with water heated on the stove. Then we dressed in our best. For us children that meant putting on a uniform just like the one we wore every day in school. The only difference being it was our newest uniform, the one we saved for special ocassions.

Just before dusk our family walked together to our small neighborhood besmedrish. If the weather was good we left a little early so we could take our time and exchange greetings with friends.

Inside the besmedrish we separated. Abraham and I took our seats with father in the men's section, while mother joined the women in their section behind the curtain.

Everyone took their places early and while we waited the men discussed business and the latest news. If I go 24   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro back to the time I was very small my memories are filled with their smiling faces and the way they laughed. As I grew older their smiles seemed to fade and the laughter was replaced with shaking heads and dread as they talked about the crazy anti-Semite who was taking over Germany.

Somehow, at least in those early days, despite the reality of Hitler's rise to power and the stories of atrocities that came out with every group of refugees, it was all too bizarre for people to believe, except, perhaps, in their hearts. I often watched as all eyes turned toward someone who was telling about a letter received from a cousin, or in a soft voice repeating a story heard in the marketplace. The faces would turn somber and something would show in their eyes until someone laughed a nervous laugh. Then someone else would try a feeble joke, the storyteller would become silent and the conversation would turn to another topic.

They would all talk at once with a false heartiness and tell each other that, after all, it has happened all through history, even in the most civilized countries, sometimes a criminal element manages to seize control for a short time. There had always been a few pogroms, murders and worse, but it never lasted. Civilized people soon regained control and put an end to the 25   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro violence.

Who knows if they really believed what they were saying? What was happening in Germany was different than anything that had ever happened before. They knew that, but what could they do? If they admitted their fear they would have to face the danger. Then what would happen?

They would have to take the next step, admit that for most part they were helpless, caught in a trap with no escape. And what could they tell their children? They could tell us nothing. There was nothing to tell. Our parents could only pat our heads to reassure us, smile sadly and knowingly at each other and make believe all would pass, even as the stories coming out of Germany grew more threatening and frightening by the day.

At sundown the service would begin. The chanting, echoed through the room taking us back five thousand years to the ancients who had formed the first links in the unbroken chain and made us feel we would not be the last. We were praying the way our people had prayed for thousands of years.

Our besmedrish was small. We were just a neighborhood congregation. We had no regular Rabbi. We had a mahraoha, a learned man who saw to it that everything was done according to the law and custom.

26   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro

When services ended no one hurried away. Conversations started before the service began were picked up where they left off and everybody shook hands with everyone else and wished them a "Happy Shabbat".

It would be dark when we returned home to the supper that had been left on the stove remaining hot for hours after the fire was allowed to go out.

There was always a place at our table for a guest or two. It was an honor to share a shabbat meal with a stranger, a visiting relative, a businessman, a peddler or anyone else who was alone.

In the early days we wondered who father would invite home after the service. What would the men talk about, politics, religion or business? Would our guest be a good storyteller? Would he tell jokes that would make us laugh? Would he have something in his pocket for us or show us a trick? The anticipation was one of the most exciting things about the shabbath.

But then, as the Nazi horrors increased, more and more of our guests were desperate German Jews fleeing for their lives. They came to us owning little more than the clothing on their backs. They were frightened, dejected people running, often without knowing where, stopping just long enough to try and warn us about the catastrophe that was coming for us just as surely as it 27   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro had come for them.

We listened somberly, feeling their fear, sharing their dread, but still feeling detached. What could we do? America had shut her gates. The Polish govern- ment was making it very difficult for people who wanted to leave. There were all sorts of restricting regulations and the few who did get out had to leave almost everything they had behind. We could not translate\their fears into a reality we could comprehend.

On Saturday morning we would get up early and return to the besmedrish to continue the shabbat service. The married men would take their seats and wrapped themselves in their prayer shawls. When the Torah was unrolled to the passage for the day each took his turn at reading the ancient passages. As each man approached the sacred scroll he touched the fringe of his Tallis to his lips and then to the Torah. I remember what a wonderful, moving gesture it seemed to be and I dreamed of the time I would be able to join them.

The service lasted until early in the afternoon and then the men gathered for the discussions that had been going on for so long they seemed to have no beginning and no end. Even when the ancient stories, the parables of the old Rabbis, the gossip from Warsaw, the latest edicts of the Polish parliament began to give way to a 28   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro morbid preoccupation with the news from Germany, it was always told with a sense of resignation. We had to take the attitude that, "what will be will be". We had no choice other than to go about our business as best we could and trust in G-d. And even going about that business was becoming tougher. The worldwide "Great Depression" was affecting the Polish economy the way it was most other countries and the lawmakers were trying to counter the affect on non-Jewish citizens by passing anti-Semetic laws designed to tax us out of business.

Despite, or maybe because of our troubles, we would linger in front of the besmedrish, as long as we could especially when the sun was warm and there was no wind. Even when it was chilly we often pulled our collars tight and stayed seeking the warmth and reassurance of being with friends who would share a common fate.

Finally, we returned home for the big shabbat meal. My parents took our guest home while I ran to the bakery for the warm chulent which I brought home triumphantly to my waiting family. It was a special errand, a game we all enjoyed. They always made a fuss and greeted me like a conquering hero.

I can still see us, when I close my eyes, Father at the head of the table saying a prayer, Abraham and me filling all our senses with the heady aroma of the chulent 29   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro as mother broke away the seal of black bread and ladelled the heavy, savory stew into our bowls. We ate it with huge chunks of the braided chalah until we could eat no more. Then we were ready for an after- noon nap.

How could I forget? Another time I ate what I think of as the best meal I ever had. It was after a forced march that had killed more than half the prisoners who started out with us and used up all the food supply. I knew I was going to die that night from hunger. Even the German guards were hungry. They killed and roasted one of their dogs, but they were not as hungry as they thought. When the taste of the roasted dog sickened them they threw the meat away. I managed to retrieve a piece of it from the dirt. It was more than a feast. Without those scraps I am sure I would not have lived until morning.

It has been written, "One third of you will die by plague or be consumed by famine among you, and one third will scatter to the wind, and I will unsheath a sword behind them."

It is also written, "Moreover I will send on you famine and wild beasts. And will bereave you of your children; plague and bloodshed also will pass through you, and I will bring the sword on you. I, the Lord, have spoken."

30   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro

It was spring of 1939 and I was about to graduate from high school.

It was a bad time to be a Jew living in Poland. It was a bad time to be a Jew living anywhere in Europe. The story of Ezekiel seemed to be coming true for too many of our people.

But along with the predictions of doom there is also hope, "Now I shall restore the fortunes of Jacob, and have mercy on the whole house of Israel: And I shall be jealous for my holy name."

And there is promise, "Then they will know that I am the Lord their G-d because I made them go into exile among the nations, and then gathered them again to their own land; and I will leave none of them there any longer."

I read those passages and thought about Ezekiel much that spring. I had to, I was picked to play the prophet in our graduation play.

It was a strange experience, although I only realize that as I think back. At the time I think we felt it was just another play. The prophecies of Ezekiel were certainly threatening our people as we prepared for graduation. The famine and wild beasts, the plague and bloodshed were so close we could feel them, but we were helpless so we went about our business and made 31   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro believe there was no threat.

What else could we do, we asked ourselves. We had a living to earn, school to attend, religious duties and a play to rehearse.

Why that particular play was chosen I will never know. It was either chance or a message from some unknown teacher, a doomed hero whose ashes later became part of the Polish countryside. I choose to think it was a message of hope and warning aimed at those of us who still could not believe our fate was sealed.

After the tryouts, when I was awarded the part, I thought of it as a great honor, especially after I learned we were going to do the part where Ezekiel restores the people of Israel. It made me especially proud that we were doing the play in Hebrew, rather than Polish, because I felt the ancient language would give the play more immediacy and more intensity. I liked the idea also because I knew my parents would be pleased with the choice. The lyric quality of the Hebrew language would set the mood and enhance the performance.

The curtain rose. Student actors, my friends and classmates, wearing white shrouds were piled in a heap in the center of the stage. They were the withered bones of Israel.

I was standing off to one side in a long robe, a false 32   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro flowing white beard covering my face.

Motionless, head bowed, I let the seconds tick away.

Finally, as the tension mounted, I slowly raised my head and began to sway. I took a shuffling step, then another and started to dance in a circle around the bones.

I raised my eyes to heaven, opened my arms wide and began to chant.

"The hand of the Lord was upon me, and he brought me out by the spirit of the Lord and set me down in the middle of the valley; And it was full of bones."

The music became louder. The tempo increased. My voice rose and implored the dry, unmoving bones.

"So I prophesied as I was commanded; And as I prophesied there was a noise, and behold, a rattling and the bones came together, bone by bone."

The students piled in the center of the stage began to stir, but only with a hint of life and I began to dance around them in a frenzy.

"And I looked and beheld sinews were on them, and flesh grew, and skin covered them, but there was no breath in them."

Then, following the command of the Lord I said, "Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe on these slain that they come to life."

33   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro

Suddenly the stage came alive. The heap of bones separated, became individuals, leaping, running, circling the stage in a joyous dance of life.

As I stood in the midst of the living house of Israel, I, Izrael Szapiro, playing the part of Ezekiel, rejoiced. Once again our nation was whole and alive, restored by the Lord, our G-d. We had been tried and had survived. If the rumors were true we would soon be tried again and would, we believed at that moment, survive again. How could we believe otherwise? How could we know what lay ahead? How were we to know that this time our persecutors would not be satisfied until we were all dead, our bones reduced to ashes and the ashes scattered to the winds?

The curtain fell. Our parents, neighbors and friends applauded as we took our bows. We basked in the warmth of their approval. We were in the limelight in our own little world and, at least for the moment, could forget the dangers waiting outside and the fear that was becoming a part of our life.

Attending a university was out of the question for me, not because I did not have the grades, but because the anti-Semites were in power in Poland, just as they were in Germany, and it was almost impossible for a Jewish student to get accepted. There were quotas and too 34   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro many restrictions.

Even so, my parents decided I should apply. In the meantime I would work with my father, but only a short time after I graduated from high school the lumber mill and factory were forced to close. Government harassment of Jewish owned businesses had become the official policy and with the worldwide depression it all became too much. We had to give up and shut the doors.

With the business gone the true reality of our position became crystal clear. We had no income, no foreseeable future or prospects and knew we could not survive on our savings for very long. To ease the tension, we began to talk about leaving, but it was really only talk because there was still no place we could go.

We had waited too long. It was impossible to leave Poland legally. You had to apply and then wait to see if you were going to be one of the lucky two or three hundred out of millions who would receive a visa. So many wanted to go and the quotas from countries willing to accept us were so small that it was not realistic to even think about leaving legally. We would not have even discussed it if we had known of a viable alternative.

We spent endless hours talking about sneaking across the border to try to make our way to Palestine, but the 35   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro trip was too strenuous and the dangers too great to seriously consider the idea. It would have meant breaking up our family. We knew the older people, like my father who had arthritis, could never survive the trip and we believed, above all, that the family had to stick together. Pogroms had always united families, not torn them apart.

It was all too much. We talked and talked. We made plans, then because a new rumor offered promise or hope, we talked some more in an endless circle and decided to wait to see what would happen. Nothing ever happened except things got worse and we would start the cycle all over again.

We were caught in a trap with no way out, but could not admit it, not even to ourselves.

My parents talked about sending Abraham and me to Israel, hoping we would find a way through the British blockade that would try to prevent us from reaching Palestine, but it was just another dream. We were both still too young to go alone.

Things were not the way they had been in the old days. At the turn of the century and before, the young, particularly those from the poorer families, went to America to work hard and make their fortune so they could send for the rest of the family.

In 1939 to talk of getting out was to talk about escape, 36   A Time In The Lile Of Israel Szapiro about leaving everything and everyone behind and going far away with no hope of ever seeing your family again. It was too much to even consider. Any alternative seemed better.

We talked. When one of my uncles heard about a distillery in Australia that was for sale the family made an offer. When that deal fell through my father and uncles tried hard to come up with something else.

And all the time the flood of German refugees was increasing and their stories of Nazi brutality were becoming more graphic, more horrible and more convincing. We knew, whether we talked about it or not, just what would happen if the Nazis took over Poland.

Mother had relatives in Alliance, Nebraska urging her to try and get our family out before it was too late, but for too long she would not consider the idea.

Finally, when the situation was desperate, my parents had to face the awful truth. They could never leave, but they had to try and save Abraham and me.

On April 20,1939 my mother wrote;

"Our Dear Cousins,

Your dear letter and also the money was just received and we thank you very, very much. We hope you all stay well and do well in your business. You asked if we would prefer to stay in Poland or come to the United 37   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro States to be with you. Certainly we know the situation and what is happening here at this time. We are sure you are more informed about everything than we are....It would be a great help if we could send our boys to America. The two of us would be happy and would be able to get by. It would give us peace of mind knowing our children have a future...Especially our son, Israel. He is an able, healthy youngster. He is capable of doing anything. We would like you to write in detail about everything. We cannot describe our happiness when we received the letter from you and the financial help.

Best Wishes for health and happiness,

your cousins,

Mala And Hershel Szapiro

Our Children send their regards. Much love to you and your family."

I did not understand at the time how much courage it took for Mother to write those words. I did not realize it was her last and only hope. I was too busy with everyday matters to give it much thought.

With my father and uncles no longer in business and no longer working our money was going fast, too fast in such an uncertain world. When we thought about the future we realized all we had to look forward to was the same fate as the poor German Jews. Every day there 38   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro were some of them passing through on their way east, trying to put as much space between themselves and the Nazis as possible. They were a beaten bewildered, people, after watching helplessly while businesses, some that had been in their families for hundreds of years were suddenly taken from them.

They lived in terror until the Nazis came, usually at night and destroyed their way of life, usually along with some loved ones. When they closed their eyes they saw the innocent being dragged from their beds in the dreaded midnight raids by the Gestapo. All of them had relatives who had been swallowed up by the concentration camps. All had seen their rabbis beaten by mobs, had watched as beards were cut off. Those who had been there during the three day reign of terror known as the "Nights of Broken Glass" were like people trying to shake themselves awake from a horrible dream.

These lost souls stopped in Meidzyrzec just long enough to try and warn us. They told their stories compulsively, trying to regain a shred of the humanity they felt they had lost. Then the fear would grip them and they would quickly head east, toward what they believed was sanctuary in Russia. "The Russians may not be friends of the Jews," they told us, "but anything is better than the Nazis." They knew, better than we did, 39   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro that Poland was doomed. Ours was a nation hanging by a thread of borrowed time and soon would become a hell on earth for Jews.

Still there was little we could do, but wait for an answer from our cousins in Nebraska, make believe everything would work out and pray.

Pray we did while we tried to live as normally as possible. Much of our daily life continued to be centered around the besmedrish and the learned discussions that never stopped. Why? Because they filled up time, kept our minds active and off our troubles for a little while and, by providing a link with the past, they gave us a bit of hope for a future. How could we deny that despite the trials and tribulations of the past, the slavery in Egypt, the Masada suicides and the destruction of the Temples, our people had survived and grown stronger and more determined in adversity? In our dread of the future that remained nameless we had to turn to the past for hope and solace. There was no other place to look.

We continued to bring home strangers after shabbat services, usually one of the pathetic German refugees, to share what were becoming meager meals.

We had no income. Prices were skyrocketing and with so many Jewish businesses being forced to shut down there were shortages of many essentials. It was becoming 40   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro harder and harder for my mother to feed us as she always had, but still we shared with those who had less than we did. That was the ancient way and it helped us retain our dignity and the feeling that we still controlled our lives.

We did this despite the accounts of horror we were forced to digest with our meals. Abraham and I listened with a kind of morbid fascination. Mother listened with pleading looks at my father that he answered with a shrug and tear filled eyes. They thought we did not notice, but we did.

We heard stories of horrors inflicted on the young and old alike. That was when I saw my parents exchange those fearful looks that asked, "Could such a thing really happen?" and then shrug, because there was nothing we could do to change anything.

When he was ordered to report for duty in the Polish army in August of 1939 my father was already over forty and suffering from arthritis. Suddenly he had to make a decision. Would he be better off reporting to the army to face almost certain death as a soldier or waiting at home and risk being shot by the Poles as a traitor?

He was still debating the question when the Germans invaded Poland on September 1,1939.

There was fighting all around us, but none in 41   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro Meidzyrzec. We saw airplanes flying so high we could barely make out the swastikas on their wings. Once in a while one would swoop down to drop a bomb that did little damage or to fire at some vehicle, but mostly it seemed the war was passing us by. We kept getting sporadic reports from the different fronts on our crystal set, but very little of what we heard made sense because in our wildest dreams we did not believe the German army was so strong or the Polish army so weak.

We also had no concept of the politics. We did not know, for instance, why the Germans, who seemed able to move at will according to the reports, did not attack us with troops or bomb us out of existence. We found out two weeks later when, on September 17, 1939 the Russians invaded Poland from the east, as the Germans had expected them to do on the first day of the blitzkrieg. Then the Red Army quickly swept around and beyond Meidzyrzec stopping just short of Warsaw on the eastern bank of the Vistula River.

As of that day Meidzyrzec ceased being a Polish town and became part of Russia, a fact that was strictly political and had no affect on our daily lives. Meidzyrzec was just a tiny dot on the map with no military significance. We realized the Russians would take charge when they were finished with more important business. 42   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro That was fine with us. As far as we were concerned they could stay away forever or occupy the town, just as long as we were safe from the Germans.

The big prize, Warsaw, was just sixty miles to the east and that's where the fighting was concentrated. We were still part of the Russian zone when we woke one morning to the sound of German tanks rumbling into town. They went directly to the brewery of Prince Potocki, loaded up their tanks with as many cases of vodka as they could and left.

Most of us stayed inside peeking out the windows. A few of the more adventurous approached the German tankers and did some trading. I saw a priest walking down the street like Sunday stroller. We thought the Germans would shoot him, but all they did was yell at him in German to get off the street.

When the German tanks left we felt strange. We wondered if it could have been a dream. We were in a state of limbo, helpless and afraid of what would happen next. We did not have to wait long.

The next day the Russians came into Meidzyrzec, a rag-tag conquering army. It was different than it had been the day before when we hid in our houses. Having seen the German refugees go past us in a steady stream heading for Russia, we thought of the Russians as 43   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro friends and greeted them as saviors. Everyone was happy and relieved and we crowded the streets to greet them. After the atrocity stories we had heard from those fleeing German Jews we felt great relief and thanked G-d that our town was in the Russian zone.

The contrast between the Germans, orderly, disciplined, spit polish perfect and the peasant soldiers of the red army was startling.

I remember especially how the Germans smoked fancy, ready-made cigarettes while the Russians rolled coarse tobacco in old newspaper.

The Russians wanted watches so badly they would empty their pockets for anything that resembled a timepiece. If you took them an alarm clock with a chain attached they would pay you any price. Most of the older people were still timid with the soldiers, but the younger men like myself felt no constraint. There was something about the attitude of the soldiers that made us realize there was no danger, so we asked them what they wanted and did a lively business. My brother and I had a good collection of watches of our own and we got others from friends, neighbors and my parents. We were not happy about parting with the watches, but we needed rubles to exist.

We were amazed. They never bargained with us. 44   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro Those Russian soldiers paid what we asked for our merchandise when they could have just taken anything they wanted the way you would expect a conqueror to do.

That feeling of thankfulness did not last long. The Germans were angry that the Red Army had waited two weeks before entering the fighting. They demanded that the Russians withdrew to the other side of the Bug River and the Russians quickly complied. That put Meidzyrzec in the German zone.

My parents were frightened, mostly for Abraham and me, but we were too young and full of life to be afraid.

Our parents could not get the stories of the Germans working young men to death in the mines and factories out of their minds. They were determined to save their children.

One day Mother packed a knapsack with bread and salted herring, gave me a kiss and a hug, and told me to take good care of Abraham. Father told us to head straight for the Russian territory on the other side of the Bug River where we would be safe.

I looked back before we turned the corner of Lubelska Street and waved. My mother and father were standing by the front gate filling their hearts with what they believed would be the last they would ever see of us.

Abraham and I turned away and walked, with several 45   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro others our age, forty miles east toward the Russian border. At every mile our number seemed to grow until by the time we reached the river we were part of a huge crowd of mostly young people. All of us had the same idea. We wanted to get across the river to safety, but at the bridge we came up against a Russian roadblock and could go no further.

The Russian soldiers had long lists of known Communists and Red sympathizers. Only those on the list were allowed to go through.

I knew I should have tried to find another way across. I could have gone up or down stream, waited until dark and tried to get across, but the truth is I was happy to use the roadblock as an excuse to turn back. I was only seventeen and had never been away from home before. Despite the threat of the Nazis I did not like being on my own and I was worried about my parents. The idea of abandoning them for my own safety did not seem right. We had been taught to honor, love and respect our elders. It was the basis for our way of life and thinking. Leaving my parents to face the dangers alone was against everything I believed.

That was the only reason I had left. I had been brought up to obey my parents, but I readily accepted the Russians refusal. Abraham and I turned back confident 46   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro that we would all find a way to survive together.

We had a tearful reunion with our parents and then settled down to wait for the Germans and the business of surviving under a conqueror who had sworn to rid the world of us and all our fellow Jews.

We did not have to wait long. In a few days the Germans arrived in force. Tanks, soldiers and the dreaded SS and Gestapo. They took over the town hall and several other buildings, appointed a Jewish Council to do their bidding and began issuing the edicts that would destroy our way of life.

The day the Germans took over from the Russians a German officer came to see my father. Before the war he had bought lumber from us and he wanted to pay his respects. He said he had to come because it was only right, but we should not tell anyone because he might get in trouble. We made much of that visit, telling each other, despite all the proof to the contrary, that it showed they were really people just like us.

Probably, if survival had not been such a full time occupation we might have dwelled on our fate and become immobilized, but as it was, it took all our energies to just get through each day.

A few of the shops that escaped German looters managed to stay open to supply some of our needs from 47   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro their dwindling stocks. Small workshops sprang up in almost every house and apartment. Almost everyone worked on something that could be traded or sold. The only ones who did not were those who did the selling. They were mostly the younger ones like me. Once we learned that there was a difference between the German soldiers and the dreaded SS, we figured out how and with whom we could do business.

The soldiers were like all soldiers, filled with a sense of their youth and power, wanting a good time, mostly with the Polish peasant girls, bored with occupation duty and looking for gifts to send home. As soon as we figured out what they wanted we did a lively business, selling what was being manufactured in the apartments or trading away our family treasures so we could manage to survive.

The big question was for how long? How long would the Nazi occupation remain a bearable affliction that could be tolerated? When would the horror stories we had heard from the German refugees become our reality?

We found out soon enough. A few months after the occupation they suddenly forced us out of our homes and made us move into the crowded section of the city that later became a walled ghetto. They came at us with 48   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro no warning. With guns and shouts they declared large segments of the city off limits to us and forced us to leave our homes.

It was a terrible shock to be chased from the only house I had ever known, to be ordered out of our large, familiar surroundings at the point of a gun. We had to leave everything, but what we could grab as we left.

We were lucky to find a place to live in the small area of the city they allowed us, even though it meant we had to share a crowded apartment with strangers. At least we were still together, still a family and the way we figured things, the war could not go on much longer.

We did not let the move or the forced change in the style of our life destroy our faith.

We had heard the United States was not in the war yet, but the rumors were flying about them getting into the fight and we thought it would only take America about two days to defeat Hitler. Then every- thing would be as it was.

When there is nothing else to sustain you it is amazing how much a rumor can do. First, our hopes rested with the British. It had taken them a few weeks, after the Nazis invaded Poland, to declare war. We heard the news on our crystal set. Immediately our spirits rose and we told each other that soon the Nazis would be finished. 49   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro When that did not happen we switched our hopes to the Americans because we had to cling to something. Someone had to win the war before the Nazis killed us all. We would not have been able to go on if we did not believe that. Even if our hopes were without foundation they enabled us to endure.

The winter was hard, but somehow we managed and by early spring had settled into our existence of bare survival. It is hard to pinpoint exactly when the real cruelty began, the shooting of innocents in the streets. Suddenly, it was just a part of our lives, the beatings, murders, kidnappings and demands for ransom.

They had become a fact of life, just as that Jewish Council, the Nazi appointed group of Jews who did their bidding, was a fact of life. We knew they had no choice. If they had refused to obey they would have been killed and quickly replaced. Knowing that filled us with mixed emotions. Sometimes we hated the council members. Other times we pitied them, but in either case we never forgot that they were the ones who issued ration cards and work permits, decided who would live where and had a hand in everything governing every aspect of our lives. Using Jews to oppress Jews was another of the Nazi tricks to make us realize how helpless we were.

It worked well. We grew accustomed to living with 50   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro cold, hunger, overcrowding and even the wanton slaughter. We knew the SS could do anything they wanted with us and there was nothing we could do to stop them. For Jews there was no law, no justice and no recourse, only Nazi cruelty, Nazi whims enforced by brute force.

We were sharing an apartment with another Jewish family at 12 Zelazna Street. Abraham, my father and I were taking any work we could find. We ran errands for the soldiers, traded with the peasants and sold anything of value we could find.

We had made it through the winter and into spring. We thought we were settling into a routine, but the Jewish Council had other plans. They assigned me to a detail that was being sent out of the city for the summer to dig irrigation ditches. I did not want to go, but I had no choice. The Council controlled all aspects of our lives. If I had not reported as ordered I would have had to try and escape. Even if I could have done that successfully, my family would have lost their ration cards, their work permits and probably would have been shot.

When I said goodbye to my parents it puzzled me that they were not more concerned. When I questioned my mother she said she did not like my going away, but in many ways she felt I would be safer with the work crew than I was running around the Meidzyrzec all day trading 51   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro in the black market and dealing with the Germans.

I had to admit that there was basis for her fears. Our people were being shot as they walked the streets. The SS was grabbing those they thought had valuables hidden away. Usually they beat their victims before dragging them to the big synagogue where they held them for ransom. It did not matter who they were, a big shot or a peasant, it was all the same.

The Nazis simply told the Jewish Council that if we did not come up with so many pounds of gold, or silver, they would shoot ten, twenty, sometimes a hundred of our people who were being held. Somehow we always came up with what was demanded, but that did not always save the victims. As often as not they were murdered anyway. It all depended on how the Nazis felt at the moment.

That's the way life was in the ghetto of Meidzyrzec, but up to that time, at least, the promises made to the work gangs were being kept probably because the Nazis needed to have the work done.

I reported with the others and we were trucked out into the country were we were housed in an old barn that had been converted into a barracks. We were prisoners. The Polish guards, who would shoot anyone who disobeyed an order or broke a rule, watched us constantly.

52   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro

Every morning the barn doors were unlocked and we lined up for one of the day's several head counts. Then we were marched out into the fields. We dug ditches all day, with only short breaks for food and then we marched back, were counted again and locked in for the night.

As I settled into the routine and took my bearings, I began to take on extra duties figuring I could earn a little extra food and easier or more interesting assignments. One of these duties almost cost me my life, another saved me.

The guards were local peasants. They lived in the small towns near the barracks and rode to work on bicycles. When they realized I was able to fix things they put me to work after hours repairing their bicycles and other machines around the place.

That was fine with me. Digging ditches was hard, boring work. The repair jobs relieved the boredom and enabled me to become acquainted with a few of the guards. At first I did not know what good that would do me, but I figured it could not hurt.

Then I was also given the job of stacking the shovels in the shed each evening after the work gangs came in from the field and giving them out again in the morning 53   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro before we marched back out to work.

One evening it took me longer than usual to put away the shovels. Before I finished they started the evening head count. To miss a count was a serious offense that could get you killed.

I was standing outside the shed trying to decide what to do when one of the guards spotted me and raised his rifle to shoot. Suddenly another guard shouted, "Don't shoot. That's the Jew who fixes our bicycles." I have no doubt I would have been dead the next moment if had not been doing that job.

Another time I was unlucky enough to be in the guardhouse when a Polish farmer delivered a gallon of potato whiskey. One of the guards wanted a drink, but did not trust the whiskey so he decided I would be his tester. He filled a cup and ordered me to drink. I did, just to stay alive. The raw whiskey burned my insides, but I remained standing and tried not to show my pain. Because I had not keeled over the guards also drank, but that gave me little comfort. I burned inside so badly that for three days I wished I had let him shoot me instead.

At the end of the summer the Germans kept their word and brought us back to our families in Meidzyrzec. Remembering how things had been when we left we were shocked by what we found. Meidzyrzec was unrecognizable. 54   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro The ghetto streets were filled with strangers. Abraham, my mother and father were thinner than I remembered. Everyone was. Their clothes were a little shabbier and they seemed more frightened.

In my absence,the town had been turned into a staging area for all the displaced Jews for miles around. The Germans had a plan to make the world "Judenrein", free of Jews. The first step was to clear large areas and transport the Jewish inhabitants to towns like ours.

They brought the people in trucks, in cattlecars and in boxcars. They were herded by Nazis with cattle prods, machine guns and fierce dogs. Those guards seemed to be men beyond pity or human feeling, men with an eagerness to kill.

Many of the people arrived dragging suitcases, some had their belongings wrapped in blankets, some had nothing but the clothes on their backs. Those who had been influential were the most bewildered. Many came out of the trucks and boxcars shouting that it was all a mistake. They demanded to see this or that official and received blows for their trouble. But most were resigned, certain that they were being taken to be killed.

When they reached the comparative safety of our ghetto they felt a sense of relief. At least they were with their own people and would live a little while 55   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro longer. They turned to us for answers. Why had they been brought to Meidzyrzec, they asked? What was next? Should they dare to hope? We had no answers for them. We had not yet learned about the death camps that were being prepared for all of us.

By April of 1940 the ghetto was near bursting. There were over ten thousand Jews. They had been brought to Meidzyrzec from as far away as Poznan to the west, Bialystok to the north and Cracow to the south. Few came from the east because the Russian controlled eastern zone was so close.

I had returned just in time. My family needed my help and I immediately resumed my trading with the German soldiers. I spoke their language, which I had learned in the classes I had attended after school. After a while I was given a job at German head- quarters. I also managed to get work there for my father and Abraham. This assured us of food and a certain amount of protection. Once again we began to think about a future.

We were still in contact with my mother's cousins in Nebraska. They were sending us packages through various Jewish organizations outside Poland. The Nazis were permitting the packages to be delivered. That seemed out of character, but we reasoned that they were 56   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro doing so to keep the packages coming. No one knew how many of them ended up in German hands. Still, we were grateful for what did get to us. At one time my parents would have wanted to die rather than ask anyone for help, but times had changed. Our situation was becoming too desperate to be that proud.

On July 16,1940, soon after we received a package, my mother wrote;

"Dear Cousins,

Your letter of June 26 was received for which we thank you and acknowledge. We are very happy that...all is going well for you. We are well here, but we are puzzled by your mentioning money. We never mentioned money in any of our letters and as of today have received none. Our friends received from their relatives food packages...cocoa, sugar, canned goods, and also used shoes and clothing. If possible we would very much appreciate packages of the same kind...We are waiting from you good news...."

The "good news" my mother was hoping for was word that our cousins had found a way to bring Abraham and me to America. We had not received the money the cousins had asked about, but the question was our answer to why the Nazis were allowing some packages 57   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro and mail to be delivered. We received a little so they could take a lot.

Daily life was hard, but what seemed even harder was the sense of losing control of our lives. My friends and I were young and angry. We took chances to win what we considered victories and to create incidents that, if we survived them, helped us retain our self esteem.

For instance, we were all forced to wear a star of David on our shirts or jackets. If a Jew was caught without one, it meant death, with no questions asked. I wore the Star of David, just like everybody else, but whenever I could I casually draped a German uniform over my arm, as if I were taking the uniform to be cleaned and always managed to cover up my star.

It was only a small victory , but important to me because the small victories gave me the courage to seek bigger ones.

The family we lived with on Zelazna Street dealt in leather. It was illegal, but so was almost everything else we did, according to the Nazis who made the laws with their guns and clubs.

The Germans kept coming into the house to search. They would go through the attic and rip out floor boards hoping to find a hidden storehouse. When I could I brought home the uniform of a high ranking German to 58   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro drape over a chair. I hoped the searchers would think we knew an important officer and not be so thorough. Who knows, maybe the uniforms did keep us from being caught and shot.

For my mother and father and the other older people in the ghetto surviving another day was enough, but for me and my friends there had to be more. We figured it was better to die trying to do something, anything, than live in fear and wait to die. We tried our best to turn it all into a game, even if it was a deadly game that only occasionally gave us a small victory and at any moment could have cost us our lives.

Soon after I went to work for the Germans they told me to move into the barracks they had set up behind their headquarters, so I would be available when they needed me. The building was outside the ghetto walls and in order to go in and out of the ghetto I needed a special pass. I used it to do a little business and to be with my friends.

Every time I went through the gate it was a risky business. I rarely entered without trying to smuggle something past the guards. Some of them were thorough. They searched everyone very completely. When I saw one of those guards was on duty I usually tried to turn around or got rid of what I was hoping to smuggle 59   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro in. Some of the other guards, I knew, could be bribed with cigarettes or whiskey, but there were times when the guards changed while I was in sight and I had to bluff my way through. Usually I told them I was running an important errand for a high ranking officer and tried to give the impression that the guard would be in trouble if I was delayed. One of the things I learned quickly was how to look relaxed and not act scared, but also not to act like a wise-guy. It was a very thin line that made going into the ghetto a very dangerous game.

And every day more and more refugees poured into our ghetto. Something had to give, but we did not know what. We had no idea that the Germans were building the Treblinka death camp.

We learned about the death camp soon enough. It happened on the first of the two most tragic days in my life.

For weeks before the ghetto had been in a turmoil as our numbers swelled. The boxcars filled with refugees were coming from as far away as Czechoslovakia and as the ghetto filled to bursting the Germans system- atically reduced it in size until all we had was a few square blocks.

We never knew when they would come. Suddenly the Germans would be there with their dogs, guns and bullhorns. A whole block, or a series of blocks, would be 60   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro declared off limits. Within minutes the soldiers and SS would roust the people from the houses and force them into the new, smaller ghetto. There was no warning. All they could take with them was what they could grab as they rushed out the door. Many slept with their clothes on and carried whatever valuables they had left on their person, just in case. But that was even more dangerous because the Nazis searched people at random and killed people caught with contraband.

But I was telling about the first of the two most tragic days of my life, August 25, 1942. By then the rousting, the searches, the fear, the utter chaos had become our way of life.

It is not easy to recall the events of that day. It is too painful. As I write this Meidzyrzec is deep in my memory. I see it, with my eyes open or closed, as a great slaughterhouse where the blood of my loved ones is mixed with the water from the river which runs through the center of the town.

The Nazis came before dawn, just as they had done so many times before, to catch us when we were most vulnerable. Only this time it was not to reduce the ghetto, but to begin to empty it. They rounded up all the elderly, the women and the young children they could find and took them to the marketplace.

61   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro

Then they searched all the houses and dragged people out of hiding. Many were shot trying to run away. Some were beaten for not moving fast enough. People were frightened, more frightened than they had ever been before. Families, like mine, were being separated. Hysterical mothers were frantically searching for their children. It was chaos.

By late morning there were more than twenty thousand people in the marketplace, out there in the broiling sun. There was no shade, no water, no toilets. Some were clinging desperately to the meager belongings they had managed to grab when the Nazis rousted them. It was their only reality. They seemed to be clinging to their bundle the way they were clinging to the hope that they would be resettled. It was a last desperate hope. The only alternative to death.

There were some who seemed resigned to their fate. In their minds they were already dead, most looked as if everything had drained from them. They simply sat and waited.

And the guards? For them it was a festive occasion, a holiday. They were snatching away suitcases, opening bundles and helping themselves, shooting protestors, brutalizing the people for the sport of it.

I wrote, "Meidzyrzec is deep in my memory", but I 62   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro meant it is as a nightmare that makes me wake up in the night screaming.

When I discovered my mother had been taken in the round-up I went searching for a German friendly enough to do me a favor. I found my man at head- quarters. He was a soldier I did a lot of business with. He considered me a trustworthy bargainer and figured I could pay him back in many ways. I pleaded with him to save my mother and he agreed to try. I told him she was sick with dysentery.

The German soldier went to the marketplace guards and said, as he pointed to my mother, "That's my Jew," and they let him take her. One Jew more or less, what was the difference to them?

The other people grabbed in the round-up remained in the marketplace all that night. At dawn the Nazis made another sweep of the ghetto. Most of the older people and children who had been hiding all day and night were captured and added to the crowd in the marketplace, while the Nazis continued to make systematic sweeps to catch stragglers.

When the soldier brought my mother to the barracks behind the German headquarters I hid her there all night, but I knew I had to move her before morning. I had to find a better place to hide her before the sweeps started.

63   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro

Just before dawn I took her to a huge barn filled with furniture stolen from Jewish homes. She climbed into a large closet and, as I shut the doors, I warned her not to make a sound.

I can still see her nodding that she understood. She was very sick, but knew her life depended on being absolutely still. Who can begin to imagine what she went through with her terror mounting and the illness working on her insides? She must have heard muffled sounds coming through the thin wooden walls of her prison closet. That must have filled her with a fear that was magnified in the dark that had to be as black as the future.

All that morning the Germans and the Polish, Lithuanian and Ukranian thugs who helped them, searched for our people. They were even helped by some of our own who were so frightened that they tried to bargain with the devil. I do not judge those Jews. In that upside down world there was no right and wrong, good or evil, everything was confused and confusing.

The searchers eventually reached the warehouse. Who knows what happened? Someone may have seen us when I put her in the closet. My mother may have made a muffled sound, a tiny noise. A whimper or an involuntary sigh may have escaped from her without her 64   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro even knowing she had made the sound.

The Nazis pulled her from her hiding place and forced her, with their clubs and guns, back to the marketplace.

I looked frantically for my German, but could not find him and none of the others would help. When the Germans began forcing the people onto the transports there was nothing I could do but stand and watch helplessly while they marched over twenty thousand people to the cattlecars at the railroad station.

It was not only my mother who was being taken. My grandfather had returned to Meidzyrzec when the Nazis threatened Warsaw. Grandpa Ruzal, his wife and her daughter, all my aunts and uncles and some of my dearest friends were in the transport.

I saw my mother for the last time as she walked with the others. Her face was flushed. She seemed dazed and distant as if she had already passed over some threshold and was in the world beyond.

Those of us who were being spared for the moment, could only stand there watching them go to the slaughter, being mocked by the Germans who were joking with each other and saying, "We are only taking them to be resettled. Just as we brought people from other places to Meidzyrzec, we are taking Meidzyrzec people to other 65   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro places that are less crowded." It was such an obvious lie that it made our sense of loss even greater.

They were going to Treblinka to die and all of us who were staying died a little with them.

Soon after our people and the transports were gone the ghetto was sealed off from the rest of Meidzyrzec with brick walls and barbed wire, but that was the least of the changes. Nothing of the old life had survived the death deportations not even those fantasies we had invented to try and make life seem endurable.

Everyone had lost someone close. We were all mourning and filled with an impotent rage as the Nazis increased their campaign of brutality. There were more random killings than ever before and greater demands. "Bring us so many pounds of gold or diamonds by tomorrow morning", the Nazis would tell the Jewish Council, "or we will shoot so many Jews each hour until you do".

Somehow,from somewhere, the gold or the diamonds or the furs or the money would appear. We simply could not allow anyone to die if there was a chance to save them and the Nazis knew this. An attic board would be pried away and a few more pieces of silverware that had been in a family for five generations would be added to the pile. The Jewish Council would deliver the ransom to 66   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro the Nazis and the hostages would be freed or shots would ring out and the laughing Germans would leave the bodies on the steps of our desecrated synagogue.

We faced danger just walking down a street. One SS officer, Franz Bauer, is a man I still see in my nightmares. Unlike the regular soldiers who were, in most instances, like soldiers in any army, no better or worse, the SS were dedicated murderers. They had been recruited from the Nazi Party, had sworn allegiance to Hitler and proudly carried out all his barbaric edicts. They may have been the elite to the Nazis, but to us they were beasts. Bauer was the worst of them all as far as I am concerned. He was a brute who was not happy, he boasted, unless he shot ten or fifteen Jews before breakfast. He needed no excuse to take a life. We learned to live with the Franz Bauers, day by day, hour by hour, because we had no choice.

The myth of resettlement had been exploded. Those few of us who would not admit our fate even as the death transports left finally had the blinders pulled from their eyes. A few Jews escaped from that first transport when they were within sight of Treblinka. After forcing themselves to see as much as they could without being caught they had made their way back to the ghetto to warn us. It was a futile gesture. There was nothing we 67   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro could do about our situation, but the horror of what they had discovered left them no choice.

They should have kept running once they escaped from the death train, but they could no longer think of saving themselves. They could no longer even think in terms of living or dying. The burden of their knowledge was too great. They came back to us obsessed by the nightmare vision of mounting heaps of eyeglasses, shoes, human hair, the warehouses of worn and tattered clothing, the pathetic mounds of broken toys, the feel of grease and stench of burning bodies that filled the air and coated their living flesh.

With their nostrils and their souls filled with what had once been our people they became zealots, the modern counterparts of the reluctant Old Testemant prophets who had to carry G-d's message to the people no matter what the personal cost. They became Jonah's who could go in only one direction with one message.

We listened to them. We had to believe, but it really did not matter. Knowing changed nothing. All we could do was live or die according to the will of our captors. The fact that we were alive any given moment only meant just that, we were alive at that moment. This does not mean we did nothing but wait for death. We, especially the young people like me, believed in life 68   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro and sought any reassurance. Despite our fear, sorrow and grief we needed hope and went to great lengths to construct our fantasy world so we would have a place to escape to, even if it was only for a few hours and in our mind.

Our hope came from rumors. When we heard America had entered the war we were elated. We convinced each other that it would only be a matter of days, weeks at the most, and we would be liberated.

When weeks passed and nothing happened we continued to do our best to survive, but not with the same heart. Our minds returned to the fate of those who had been taken from us and we began to despair. Then the news came that Germany had attacked Russia and our mood changed. The Russians were our saints and saviors and we convinced each other that they would sweep the Germans away and free us all.

Did we really believe? Who knows? We had to believe something or die before we took another breath.

Just as history is divided into B.C. and A.D. life for us was divided into "before deportation" and "after deportation". August 25, 1942 was the dividing line. After that date no one left in Meidzyrzec could forget how fragile our hold on life was, especially with the transports 69   A Time In The life Of Israel Szapiro becoming a way of life, a sentence of death imposed with more and more frequency.

There were two more transports in October and another in December. It was obvious that the numbers were being determined by the speed in which the Nazis could kill. It seemed only a matter of time before we would all be consumed.

That made life both cheaper and yet dearer. To continue to live we were determined to put up with almost anything. Sensing our determination the Nazis pushed us to test our limits. They forced us, the Jews of Meidzyrzec, into a ghetto that grew smaller by the day and more like a prison by the moment.

Because I was still living outside the walls, in the barracks behind German headquarters, I still had a pass that enabled me to go in or out of the ghetto. There were several others who also had passes. We became the lifeline for those trapped inside.

People were starving, dying in the streets. Every morning the carts came to haul away the bodies left on the sidewalks or slumped in doorways.

Every evening some of those who were starving or were so sick they knew they would die if they did not get outside the walls, tried to slip past the guards. Some 70   A Time In The life Of Israel Szapiro were successful, most were caught and shot at once or were dragged away to be executed when the Nazis felt like killing.

Living with my father and brother in the barracks on the outside of the ghetto made life tolerable for us, but it also made the plight of our friends in the ghetto a cause we had to try to relieve.

We smuggled in food and medicine at every opportunity. I had a big overcoat with hidden pockets. Night after night I would hide things in the lining that I had gotten from a German in trade, or that I had held back from our rations. Then I would go to a spot near the way into the ghetto and wait for a guard who seemed less vicious before trying to bluff my way in. I would smile and make jokes with the guards who thought me a comic figure in my oversized coat. I played to their vanity, became what they thought I was, a Jewish clown who made them feel superior, but I never forgot for a moment that I could be dead the next minute if they decided to search me or just felt like putting a bullet in my head. By joking with them I was breaking a cardinal rule of survival, I was making myself conspicuous, but I had no other choice. The only thing that kept me from screaming or throwing myself on them was that I had 71   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro learned to live in a world gone mad.

After my mother was taken I lost the old values that had been with me since childhood. I ran errands for the Germans and witnessed the random shootings, the brutalizing of innocent people and went about my business. When a Nazi decided to make a joke out of one the few elders who had escaped the transports my spirit rebelled, but I looked away and hurried on.

Most of my friends survived the same way. There were times when we decided to say the hell with it. We talked about fighting back. We debated for endless hours the effectiveness of dousing our bodies with gasoline, setting ourselves on fire and running into the Nazi ranks or headquarters. Our talk was filled with how many of them we would take with us before we died.

Then someone else would point out the futility of martyring ourselves, how it would be no different than surrendering. How we would be playing right into the Nazis hands by helping them carry out their plans for us. Our actions would simply result in more Jewish deaths and bring the world closer to being Judenrein. Then we would shake our heads and vow to live as long as possible, just to show them we were people with feelings, who loved life as much as they did.

72   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro

We were young, too young not to want to live, to cling to life. Even if we knew our days were numbered we could not help filling with the sense of being alive. We wanted to live every moment. That made the thought of imminent, premature, senseless death that much harder to accept. We felt a burning need to escape, if not physically then at least emotionally. We drank when we could get whiskey, made love with no thought of the old values. We were not angry with our elders and did not mean to flaunt their values or hurt them with our actions, but In the crowded quarters allotted us it was hard not to so. Our elders knew they had no answers for us and realized we were justified in our anger and frustration. They ignored our behavior as best they could.

We also played silly games with our lives. By defying the Nazis in little ways, such as the way I did when I draped a jacket over the Star of David on my coat or when I smuggled things into the ghetto, we felt a little more in control, a little prouder.

All our lives, as we grew up in Meidzyrzec, we were taught we were Jews and what it meant to be a Jew in concept and practice. Judaism was not only the way of our parents, we learned, it was the way of life, 73   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro the way of the world.

But with the coming of the Nazis everything turned upside down and the old ways seemed not only futile, but ludicrous. Most of the elders continued to pray and live by the ancient ways as best they could, but the young could not find the heart to do the same. We abandoned all restraint and asked who was this G-d who could allow the Mala Szapiros and the Meyer Ruzals to die in the gas chambers? Who was this G-d who could allow the devil's henchmen to take over the earth? Why should we worship such a deity? Why? Why?

We did not mock our elders. Our hearts broke for them, bewildered and doomed as they were. We only turned from their ways and sought earthly pleasures, forgetfulness, a brief respite, in each other. The past, we believed, was dead and we could not think about a future. We lived a macabre existence forced upon us by hated strangers who had the power of life and death over us. We had only the pleasures we could give each other and controlled only the moment we were living. We were determined to make the most of every second.

On the evening of April 1,1943 I finished work, traded for a bottle of wine and some bread on the black market and went into the ghetto. I shared the food with 74   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro a girl friend and her family and then we went to bed. As usual her parents ignored us and let us go our way.

In the early morning, just before dawn, we suddenly were awakened by shouts and gunfire in the street. We assumed it was another transport but did not know for sure because there seemed to be many more Germans and much more noise and confusion. We heard loud voices yelling, "Get out! Get out! Everyone into the street", and then gunfire and more shouts.

We were still half asleep, but we sensed we were in terrible danger. As we hurried into our clothes someone burst into our room and told us to follow them into the hiding place.

I went with the others as they ran up the stairway to the top floor. We pulled away some boards, crawled into an attic room on the other side and carefully put the boards back in place.

The tiny room was deathly quiet, so quiet we could hear our teeth chattering. Even the youngest children seemed to sense the danger. They filled with the terror that was shared by all the adults as they pushed their faces into the bodies of their parents.

We all strained our ears, trying to listen to the muffled sounds that were filtering into our hiding place, 75   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro but all the shouts were too indistinct to make sense.

The tension was almost unbearable. A small girl with us began to cry and her mother could not still her sobs. The others in the attic became angry. We were afraid the Nazis would hear. In desperation the mother covered the child's mouth with her hand and pulled her close. She must have pressed too hard. The crying stopped, but the little girl was dead.

Suddenly we heard loud voices just on the other side of our wall that frightened us horribly and filled us with a sense of impending death that rose like bile in our throats. As shouts and curses mixed with a few pitiful cries we realized the Nazis had discovered the hiding place of some people in the house next door. We were safe for the moment, although we knew it could be our turn at any moment.

Then it was quiet again except for the muffled noises drifting up from the street.

We were helpless. We prayed for the day to end, thinking that somehow we would be safe if we remained undiscovered until darkness.

Night finally came. The street noises stopped and we dared hope that maybe the Nazis had left the ghetto, but we were still afraid to abandon our hiding place. With another boy my age I stole silently out into the street. 76   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro We slipped from doorway to doorway and then returned reluctantly to the attic with the bad news that all the workers, both inside and outside the ghetto, had been rounded up.

My brother and father, who had been taken from the barracks where we lived and all the ghetto people the Nazis had caught had been taken to the marketplace to wait for the cattlecars. People who had been found hiding had been marched to the cemetery and shot.

We learned that the noise we had heard from next door early in the raid happened because one of the people hiding there had gone berserk. His shouting had brought the Nazis and their Polish helpers and they had all been taken away and shot.

We knew we could not stay in hiding forever, but we had no other place to go. The round-up was not over. When they found us we would die. We were trapped and could only wait for inevitable death.

It was a cold night. The children finally fell asleep while we, the older ones, sat huddled together, hungry, thirsty, frightened, not daring to hope or think about the coming day.

At dawn, as some of us dozed, we were suddenly jolted by the sound of footsteps and shouts from a nearby attic.

77   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro

"Out you bandits," the voices were yelling. There was the horrible sound of blows and then everything became quiet again.

A half hour went by. We were slipping back into our miserable reverie when we were once again brought back to reality by the sound of a rifle butt banging against the outside of our attic wall.

A woman's voice shouted, "Jews, we know your are in there. We know you Jews are hiding from us. Come out and you won't be shot. If we have to come in we will kill you all."

We were caught. We slowly left our sanctuary to step into the midst of the Nazis who were lined up on the stairs and landings. As we passed them they hit us and pushed us forward. When we were all outside they forced us to kneel on the pavement. We were numb. We knew we were dead.

One man said, "Let's die like Jews. Everyone sing the Hatikva before we die." Why not? We started to sing while we waited for a bullet in the back of the head.

The bullet never came. Whether it was the audacity of our singing, a change of heart or orders, I do not know. We were suddenly told to rise and march to the marketplace. There we joined several thousand others 78   A Time In The life Of Israel Szapiro including my father and brother and all of my friends. All of us were thinking, that soon we would be dead. I remember how beautiful the day was. The sky was blue. The sun was shining. It looked like nature was happy with our misery.

By the next day every Jew in Meidzyrzec had been rounded up. When we were forced into the cattlecars it was the first time in three hundred years Meidzyrzec was Judenrein. There were no Jews left at all.

The cattlecars were filled with our people. The women, the children and the elderly were taken to the gas chambers and fire pits of Treblinka. My father was one of them. He was barely in his forties and he was gone.

Abraham and I were in another transport. We did not know that we were going to a camp where we might find a way to survive for a little while longer. When the doors of the boxcar closed on us we assumed they were closing on life and we filled with impotent rage.

I was nineteen. I wanted to live. I felt as if I had not started my life, had never had the chances life offers, and it filled me with such anger that I vowed I would live every minute, very second. I would not give up my life if there was a way. But would there be? That was the question I could not answer.

79   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro

Everyone one of us pressed into that stinking, jolting, overcrowded cattlecar was frightened. We talked in low voices, some with concern, some with bravado as we tried to judge the amount of time we had been travelling and the speed of the train.

We knew if the train was heading for Treblinka we probably would die before the day was over. If it went somewhere else we might have a chance.

The train was filled with the deadening, monotonous, jolting sound of iron wheels on iron rails. Time passed. We began to suffer from thirst as the temperature in the boxcars climbed and the overpowering stench of too many frightened bodies crammed into too small a space became acute. We thought we could not bear another moment even as the hours passed.

There was a constant, low murmuring. Quiet conversations between people desperate to say something before it was too late. Anger, sudden eruptions of rage boiling over into shouts at G-d, the very same G-d the pious and zealous were praying to. But most of us were silent, our thoughts turned inward, half listening to the collective sounds, part of what was happening and yet apart even from ourselves.

Suddenly the train stopped with a jolt. We all came awake. Drenched in a cold sweat, clawing our way out 80   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro of a nightmare. We had been praying for the tortuous ride to end, but we were unprepared for whatever lay ahead. The ride had ended too soon.

The doors of the car were opened and the murkiness was replaced by a flood of light so strong we were blinded in the glare. We squinted and tried to shield our eyes with our hands. We wanted to get our bearings just in case there was a choice to make, something that could be done, but there was no time. The guards were on us hitting out with clubs, chasing us almost into the mouths of the snarling dogs straining at their leashes, growling, looking as if they lived only for the chance to tear us apart.

They lined us up on the platform of a train station. We were in Lublin, Poland. We could see the name on the train station, painted neatly on a board nailed to the tidy depot.

We were not in Treblinka. We had no idea if we were at our final destination, but there seemed a chance to live, a little while longer if you could escape the clubs, the shouting, cursing Nazis and the vicious, snarling dogs. In the bedlam I lost track of Abraham. At some point he had gone one way while I went another. I knew if we both survived I would find him, but there was little time to think about it then.

81   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro

We were ordered into waiting trucks. Those who did not move fast enough were clubbed to the ground. Several were attacked by the dogs. It was bedlam, but a planned bedlam rather than chaos. As soon as a truck was crammed so full that not another person could be forced inside the doors were slammed shut and it drove off.

When the truck I was in finally stopped and the doors opened, I found myself in Majdanek, one of the largest of the labor/concentration/extermination camps.

There may have been a selection as we got out of the trucks, but I was not aware of it. All the Nazis seemed to be shouteing orders at once. They herded us into the courtyard of the camp and headed us for the bath house. There we were ordered to strip and every hair on our body was shaved away by other prisoners.

I did as I was told because the choice was clear, submit or die. Naked and shivering from the cold they forced us into barrels filled with an evil smelling liquid the Nazis called a disinfectant. Then we were issued our "uniforms", a civilian jacket and a pair of trousers, taken from some other captive. What made the nondescript outfit even worse was that the Nazis had painted red stripes down the legs of the trousers and across the back of the jacket. This was to make it easy to identify escapees. 82   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro We were issued a pair of rough, wooden shoes,a tin cup and a bit of advice. Prisoners who had been there a while told us to tie the cup to our waist with a piece of string and guard it with our life. It was to be used at all meals. "Without your cup you could starve to death before you could steal another," they said and we believed them.

Finally we were marched to a barracks and assigned a sleeping space on a plank covered with mangy straw. It was so small a space you could not sit up or turn. Our Kapo, the prisoner/guard in charge of us, made it clear that our next bed might be a whole lot worse. Kapos were mostly German criminals, taken from German jails and put in charge of the prisoners in the camps. They were hard, brutal people, with the power of life and death over us and to have even a chance to survive a prisoner had to learn to get along with his kapo.

It was all a horrible nightmare. Nothing about that hell could be connected with the life I had known, not even the life in the last days of the ghetto, which seemed very far away. But at least I was still alive.

It was my first night in camp and already I had to forget every concept of right and wrong, justice and injustice if I hoped to survive. I belonged, at least in terms of my body, to the Nazis. My life could be snuffed out 83   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro by a whim, a glance, or a guards desire to make an example of me. At any moment I could become the victim of a random bullet or a hangman's noose. If I escaped all those horrors I could expect to be starved or worked to death in a short time. That was my future. I was a disposable commodity to be used and then discarded. Still I vowed to survive, one hour, one day, every minute I could.

To have even a chance to do so I had to put out of my mind all ideas of what was a proper diet or how much a person had to eat to keep from starving. I had to make up my mind that somehow I would live on whatever I was given to eat.

It turned out to be very little. Each morning they gave us some black stuff they called coffee. At noon we were given a cup of "soup", weeds boiled in water. If I was "lucky" it had a few strands of "macaronis", the green shoots that grow on old potatoes. It was a big joke in the camp, that macaroni soup, but no one laughed.

For the evening meal we got another cup of the black stuff called "coffee" and a slice of hard, coarse bread that threatened to destroy your insides. That was it. You could learn to survive on that or starve to death.

The first days were bewildering for me and everyone else, but then I began to settle in. Part of me decided to 84   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro accept what I could not control and another part spent every possible moment trying to figure out what I had to do to stay alive. I often wonder about that desire to live no matter what. I am not sure if it was this thing called self preservation or just the deep, deep anger that made me want to keep the Nazis from getting their way. Once I learned how cheaply they held our lives, life became more dear to me.

As soon as I was settled in a little I went searching for Abraham. I found him in one of the other barracks and we embraced with an intensity we had never displayed before. I was never so happy to see anyone in my life. We were the only Szapiros left on earth.

My life went on. I was hairless like the others, but I refused to believe I looked like the rest of the prisoners. I was always hungry and felt on the verge of madness. I was always cold in my threadbare, ill-fitting uniform. All my senses were repelled by the crowded, evil-smelling, filthy barracks, but I went on and somehow, day by day, taking each minute one at a time, I managed to survive. And I began to realize I had never know my capacity for suffering.

There were many who had been transported with me who had grown up in the same atmosphere of love and protection that I had enjoyed. They had to make the 85   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro same choices I made, forget everything they had ever learned about human behavior, stop thinking like sheltered children or die. Our teachers were the guards who, with threats, beatings, shootings and hangings, taught us our lessons. They so demeaned life that it became a precious commodity worth holding onto no matter what. There were some among us who could not, or did want to, fight for life as hard as it had to be fought for. They became the musselmen, the ones who were ready to die. At some time or another every one of us was a musselman willing to surrender to inevitable death, but for those who lived the will returned in time to save us.

I did not know what a Kapo was before we reached the camp. In fact I did not know such a creature existed, but I quickly learned about the rule of the Kapos. The Germans had emptied their prisons and insane asylums and shipped the inmates to the concentration camps to rule the Jewish prisoners. In the hierarchy of the camp we took orders from the Kapos and they dealt with the guards. The Nazis usually avoided contact with the prisoners, unless they wanted to inspect, hurt or make sport of us.

The Germans used the Kapos the same way they used the Jewish Councils in the ghettoes. They would order the Kapos to make us work faster, to hang a half 86   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro dozen of us as an example or to beat a helpless victim to death while they stood by with clean hands to watch the spectacle.

For the Kapos the rewards were many. They were released from their prison or asylum, given brute authority, decent food, whiskey, drugs and all the women prisoners they wanted.

In that world where all of life's norms were perverted, where good, as we had known in, no longer existed, sadism was accepted as normal and death more certain than life, the Kapo ruled.

Abraham and I adjusted to life in Majdanek as best we could, although we could not really believe what was happening to us. Many of our friends and neighbors from Meidzyrzec were in Majdanek with us providing a link with the past, but as they died or disappeared the link became weaker and only the present remained. I learned, for example, that if I traded a half of my piece of bread for a cigarette I could take a small puff from time to time and make it last for a whole day. That made me think I was less hungry and so I traded whenever I could.

I woke each morning in pre-dawn darkness from a troubled sleep that probably would have been unbearable if my tired body had not forced me into a nightly stupor. 87   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro Rousted by Kapos shouting abuse I would line up, with all the others, for the "Apell", or roll call, that was carried out twice a day winter, summer, in rain, snow or blistering heat.

After the count I would be allowed to to take my turn squatting over the trench that was our toilet for about ten seconds before I had to line up for my cup of "coffee". The rest of the day, until darkness, was consumed by backbreaking work.

Before I was given a regular assignment I was with one of the gangs assigned mindless tasks such as carrying rocks from one pile to another and back again in an endless, futile chain.

I had to turn my jacket around to make a pouch for the rocks out of the tails. Some of us would stand by the rock pile and fill that pouch as each prisoner ran up and then, the prisoner would run, with the unbearably heavy load, to the other end, dump his load and run back for another. When the pile was depleted we went to the other end and repeated the process. in a deadening cycle. I moved fast because the Kapos, the guards and the strolling Nazis were all there to make sure none of us slackened our pace. A kick, a blow, sometimes a shot from no where provided the incentive.

After a few days on the rockpile I was assigned to a 88   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro kommando, a squad that was working in a lumber yard outside the gate. It was an assignment with both advantages and disadvantages. Anything was better than the rockpile and an outside job meant a chance to pick up bits of food from civilians and contact with the world. That contact was something we all craved because it was hard inside the camp to remember there was a real world. Still the assignment had its own special dangers. Strict rules were enforced and the punishment for even minor infractions was greater.

One morning, after the head count and "breakfast" I lined up with the others in the Kommando and we marched through the gate, led by our Kapo. For some reason, either to impress his superiors or amuse himself, this Kapo made us sing as we marched and in that way he learned that I had a good voice. He ordered me to lead the singing. Then he ordered me to make up songs and insisted they be dirty. He made the others learn the words that we sang at the top of our lungs as we went through town to the lumberyard.

It was degrading and I hated what he made me do, but then thought differently when I realized I could use it to my advantage. If the Kapo liked a new song in the evening he would take me around to the kitchen to sing it for the night cooks. My reward was an egg or some 89   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro bread and the difference between life and death to a starving man.

With that little bit of extra food I was able to help my brother and being singled out by this Kapo gave me standing with the other prisoners, a little bit of clout. I needed that clout when the Polish prisoners in Abraham's barracks, thinking he was helpless because he was alone and a Jew, began ganging up on him and stealing his rations.

He told me of this new trouble and I went to my Kapo. It was just like the time I tried to get my mother out of the marketplace in Meidzyrzec. The Kapo went to the Poles in the barracks, pointed to Abraham and said, "Layoff. That's my Jew." Talking, as he was to prisoners, I am sure he made his point with a few blows as well. From then on no one bothered Abraham.

Being able to help my brother made me feel better. I knew my parents would approve. They would expect me to do that. The feeling made up a little for the difficulty of having someone else to worry about when my own hold on life was so weak.

It was not something I thought about, feeling responsible for Abraham, at least not then, not while he was still with me. It was only when he was gone that I thought about having someone and being utterly alone.

90   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro

One day Abraham was there and the next he was gone without a trace. He came to me one evening and said his name was on a shipment list for the next day. When I was finished work that day I went looking for him, but could not find him. I asked in his barracks, but no one seemed to know what had happened to him.

After the war I went to the authorities, but they claimed there was no record of Abraham ever leaving Majdanek or arriving in any other camp. He is not on any of the lists of victims or survivors. It is as if he never existed anywhere but in my heart.

The memories of those first weeks in Majdanek are not like normal memories that pass through the mind in orderly fashion. They are like festering wounds that will not heal. They hide in my mind and jump at me when I least expect them. They haunt me in my sleep and when I am awake.

I was forced one night to stand by the gallows and sing while a man was hung. Had I refused they would have hung me alongside him. I sang and lived on.

I marched off to work one morning singing as always. While I worked in the lumber yard with the kommando one of our men slipped away, vanished, escaped and left us to our fate. We returned to camp short one prisoner, fearful of what would happen to us. I was very frightened. 91   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro I had seen entire kommandos condemned to death as an example to others thinking of trying to escape.

This time we were "lucky". The Kommandat ordered my gang to strip naked. We lined up and one by one and stretched across a board. I was given twenty-five lashes on my bare skin with a leather whip dipped in water to increase its ability to inflict pain. I had suffered blows before and felt the whip, but never in such a deliberate manner or for so long. I thought I would die before they finally stopped and allowed me to crawl away.

I went back to my space in the barracks in more pain than I imagined possible. Every inch of my flesh seemed on fire. I was burning with fever. My teeth were chattering as my body went from hot to cold, cold to hot. It was a long, agonizing night of pain. I lay semi- conscious in the dark not knowing if the moans I heard were coming from me or the other beaten prisoners. Hour by hour my aching muscles cramped and the cuts and welts stiffened as the flesh around them swelled grotesquely.

With the morning came my moment of truth. The Kapos rousted us and my fate was in my own hands. I had to force myself to join the others for the head count or I was a dead man, a musselman. If my will to live 92   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro was gone, if I had no more strength or anger left all I had to do was stay where I was and wait. The Nazis would come soon enough and kill me.

But I refused to die that way, not while I still could make the choice. I forced myself to my feet and outside for the count.

Once I began to move about the nightmare of the night receded in the reality of the life and death struggle. I was able to make it through the day even though I was reassigned to the rockpile.

That night the pain was bad again, but not as bad as the night before. I left the barracks in the morning and made it through another day and then another until the beating became just a bad time I had survived.

I could not allow myself to dwell on the beating, the pain and the indignity, not if I hoped to stay alive. Life in camp was such a bitter struggle for daily existence that it consumed every moment and every bit of strength. Each of us had to find his own way to create some sort of hope. Mine, just as it had been in Meidzyrzec during the occupation, was to cling to every rumor that swept the camp.

For a long time I believed that America was defeating the Nazis on every front and that it was only a matter of days, weeks at the most and I would be free. There was 93   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro no basis for my belief. I had heard no facts, but the thought gave me the courage to carry on for one more day and then for another. When my courage failed anger took over and filled me with bile threatening to choke me. That anger would sustain me until I heard another rumor I could believe.

It was 1943. Stories about the Nazis attempt to make Warsaw Judenrein swept through Majdanek. The few people who were transported to Majdanek told us almost everyone in Warsaw was going to the gas chambers of Treblinka, a few were going to other camps, like ours, and many were being killed in the streets.

It seemed to be taking the Nazis a very long time to accomplish their goal, even though there were almost two hundred thousand Jewish people in Warsaw. We wondered about that until we began to hear other rumors. They started after most of our people had been transported or killed and the ghetto had been reduced to less than sixty thousand. That, according to the prisoners brought to Majdanek, was when the Jews began fighting back.

Suddenly the Nazis were in a fight. Their tanks were stopped by bombs, flaming bottles filled with gasoline. They were facing Jews willing to become human torches. Determined, desperate, Jewish fighters were becoming 94   A Time In The life Of Israel Szapiro human sacrifices trying to force the Nazis to back off and change their tactics.

The people of that ghetto, fighting for all of us, attacked the Germans from sewers turned into bunkers, from rooftops and cellars. They made Nazis die for every inch of territory, for every life they had tried to take.

The fighting went on for an incredible six weeks while the prisoners in my camp waited for every transport and the news it brought. I did not know then that the whole world was watching with us and had begun to question the Nazi claim of invincibility, but for us, for me, it was a fight that restored my spirit. It gave me new hope and courage.

Finally, we heard that the Germans had started a massive assault against the ghetto fighters in an attempt to destroy all of them to end the resistance.

From the last transport to come out of Warsaw we heard about the events of April 19,1943, the first day of Passover. The fighting went from house to house, sewer to sewer, across the few remaining rooftops as the number of Jews became less and less.

In the end a few were captured, some escaped through the sewers, but most were killed and the ghetto was reduced to a pile of rubble without a building, or even a 95   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro wall, left standing.

The reports of the uprising changed nothing in my daily life. If anything the Nazis became even more brutal. The struggle for survival in Majdanek grew harder by the day as the fighting in Warsaw dragged on, but while they were battling, and for a long time after, the thought that somewhere on the earth Jews were killing Germans made me feel like a man again.

My brother was gone and, as far as I knew, I was the only Szapiro on earth. I had nothing to live for but survival, a minute, an hour, a day at a time.

My name came up on a transport list and I filed into a boxcar with many others. As we were crowded into the boxcar we tried to get as close to the small, barred window as possible. We all knew that conditions inside would be especially bad in the center of the car. There you would have to fight for every breath and would be surrounded by the stench. At the window, crowded as we were, you could at least see something and catch a breath of air. Boarding that boxcar, prodded by the Nazis guards and their snarling dogs I wondered if this would be the last ride I would take. I almost did not care. I settled in with the others, so crowded we could not even sit and let my mind fall into a protective stupor that altered time and made misery seem almost a natural state. 96   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro I became what I always became, in that man-made hell, while I waited to learn my fate.

When the doors opened I was in another kind of hell. This one was called Birkeneau, a camp that was part of the sprawling Auschwitz complex. It is often referred to as "Auschwitz Two".

It was a damp, dreary, fog shrouded, ugly place, with a smell of fire and burnt flesh hovering in the air.

Auschwitz was a death camp. The Germans had chosen the location because it was close to Cracow and the main rail lines from the east. People were being sent there to die. Some of us healthier ones might be spared for a while to man the bath houses, the crematoriums and the ovens, to sort the clothing, pull the teeth filled with gold, bale the human hair that piled up in the warehouses, but the reprieve would be short at best as far as the Nazis were concerned.

The choice of who would get that reprieve and who would die at once, was made at the train station. That was another one of those times when I was "lucky"' Anytime I came close, but did not die I thought of myself as "lucky".

Most of the prisoners from my train were marched directly into the gas chambers. Those of us who were selected to work were taken for "processing".

97   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro

Once again I was forced to strip. Once again the stubbles of hair were shaved from my body and my inflamed and tortured flesh was swabbed with kerosene soaked rags to "disinfect" me. Then I was issued the black and white striped paper uniform that has become a symbol of our suffering and I was marched with the others to a big shed.

Inside there were long rows of tables. At each there was a prisoner with needles and a bottle of ink.

I was given a number and ordered to the end of a line. Suddenly I realized what was about to happen. It seems like such a little thing compared with some of the other horrors and indignities I had already suffered, but there was something inside that screamed at the outrage.

I wanted to shout my protest against the branding. Shout that I was a man, not a "thing". I was not cattle, but I made no outward protest and shuffled along with the rest. I reached a table where a prisoner seized my arm without looking at me and indelibly marked my number on my arm along with the small triangle that meant I had come from Majdanek.

To the Nazis Israel Szapiro no longer existed. I had become #129564.

I was assigned to a huge wooden structure built to house five or six hundred that was crammed with over 98   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro twelve hundred of us. One of the jokes was that if the building disappeared during the night we would all stay in place we were wedged in so tight.

Unlike Majdanek which held mostly Jewish prisoners, with a few non-Jewish Poles mixed in, Birkeneau was a mixture of everything. There were many foreign soldiers, Russians and other Slavs, who had been captured in the fighting. There were civilians from the occupied countries, political prisoners and those accused of sabotage or other offenses ruled "crimes" by the Nazis.

There were many who should have been in insane asylums. We were all mixed together and treated the same with only one difference. Non-Jewish Polish prisoners could receive packages. I still remember my joy when I found the scraps the Poles cut off their moldy bread. Those were "windfalls" that meant the difference between surviving or perishing.

It took me a while to figure out what the Germans had in mind when they created that sprawling complex that was really three camps.

Birkeneau basically was set up to provide a labor pool. There the daily death rate was high, but death was a side issue, not the basic purpose for the camp's existence.

The main camp, the one called Auschwitz, was a 99   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro death camp. Its only purpose was to kill as many people as possible and to dispose of the bodies.

Buna, the third camp in the complex, was the I.G. Farben synthetic rubber factory. Farben had a contract with the SS. They bought the labor of prisoners, so many slaves, at so much per head. It gave them the right to work us to death if they wished. Why not? The SS had an abundance of prisoners and in the Nazi plan we were all going to die anyway.

It seemed of little concern to those men of business and industry whether a prisoner died in a gas chamber, on the gallows or was worked to death in their factory. That was important only to us prisoners.

Sometimes, in the barracks, when we had the strength to talk at all, we would discuss the thinking of these civilians, how they did not see themselves as murderers, but only as workers following orders, doing their job. The creatures who manufactured the gas pellets, the oven builders and the rest. I wondered what was in their minds when they closed their eyes and tried to sleep? Did they even admit to themselves that they were participants in mass murderer? Probably not, but they were and on a scale larger than the world had ever seen before.

Most of the time, however, I did not have strength to 100   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro spare for such thoughts. In the evenings, the only time I had to myself, I usually sat silently and tried to conjure up images of the old life, the old ways and the loved ones who were gone. I filled my mind with the dishes that my mother served on Shabbat, the savory chulent, the steaming, braided chalah. I thought of food, food and freedom, of living one more day.

I wanted to stay alive one more hour, one more day, so I could be there when the Russians or Americans broke through the German lines. I wanted to see the innocent faces of our rescuers change when they saw what the Nazis were doing to us and I wanted to witness the retribution. Above all I wanted to witness the retribution.

Vengeance was something that stayed in my thoughts, went with me every hour I was awake and filled my dreams. I knew it could not bring back any of those who were gone, it could not erase the pain or make up for the suffering, but the thought nourished my soul and helped me stay alive. To stay alive was the constant battle. I knew I had a breaking point and I held it at bay with the thought of vengeance.

Those who could not resist any longer gave up. They ran into the electric wire strung around the camp or lay on their bunks in the morning until the count was 101   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro over. Then the SS came to haul them away.

No one blamed those who chose death to a life of starvation, terror, being worked to the limit and beyond, but I never understood them. If I had it probably would have meant my moment had arrived and I was about to choose to die, or rather, give up life.

I remember two brothers, why they stick in my mind out of so many I do not know. They ate salt, all the salt they could get. Even though we had nothing we could always find something to trade. A broken comb, a button, a piece of tin or string, things like that. Everything had value to someone. These two brothers were trading everything they could for the salt they craved. Eating salt dehydrates the body. Pretty soon those two were just skin and bones. One of them died shortly after they started with the salt. I had to bury the other several weeks later.

They chose their own way and no one tried to stop them. No one ever tried to stop anyone who made up his mind he had had enough. Each of us lived in his own private hell. We had no right to interfere with another's choice. What argument could we make? Who could judge them? They were musselman, those without the strength or will to carry on. We were all musselmen 102   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro at some point, and those who could not find the will or means to carry on died. They either committed suicide by running into the electric fences or by staying in the barracks until the roll-call was over and the guards came to take them to the gas chambers or the yard to be shot.

The workers for Buna came from Birkeneau. Birkeneau was a warehouse for humans, who were kept busy until they died or were needed at Buna. The factory there seemed to have an insatiable need for workers. That was why Birkeneau was so large.

"WORK IS FREEDOM" was painted over the main gate to Auschwitz mocking us and making me feel like a part of a huge monstrous joke.

We lived a sub-human existence in the camp, which gave us no other choice but death. There was no middle position. I lived my choice with a single minded determination. Death might have released me, but I thought of it as a victory for my tormentors, and that was enough to make me fight to live.

Every minute I was awake I was concerned with practical thoughts, how to get a little more to eat, how not to be killed, how to save a little energy, get an easier work assignment, remain invisible. I avoided eye contact with the guards and tried to stay out of sight as much as possible. When I was ordered to do something, anything, I 103   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro did it quickly and with no questions.

There were big, fat rats with shaggy coats in the camp. They feasted off the bodies and the debris. They lived in the warehouses, building their nests in the piles of human hair, shoes, clothes and other items stolen from the prisoners. When things were quiet the guards put poisoned biscuits out to kill the rats and then told us to skin them for their shaggy coats. The guards had a ready market for the pelts in the nearby towns where the peasants bought them and used them to make winter clothing.

Sometimes prisoners would not be able to resist the poisoned biscuits and we would haul their bodies to the ovens. I was also often tempted, but I resisted.

I learned a human being can endure anything. If you can't get something you do without it and live on. In the winter, for instance, when I had to mix cement in the bitter cold without gloves or extra clothing, I was cold, but I did not freeze. I worked and learned to live with what I had.

My first job in Birkeneau was with a construction kommando that was erecting barracks for the thousands of prisoners expected in the months ahead. The buildings were being constructed of concrete which had to be carried up steep ramps barely wide enough for an unburdened 104   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro man to walk on.

We had these boxes with two by fours nailed to the sides for handles. After the boxes were filled with concrete two of us would grasp those handles and carry the box up the steep ramps. If a prisoner could not keep going they beat him to death or sent him to the gas chambers. Someone else took his place. There was no shortage of workers. The threat was strong enough to make me keep up.

I was twenty when I was transported to Birkeneau and, despite everything, I was still comparatively healthy. If I had not been I would not have survived the selection at the train station, but a few weeks on the construction crew had me closer to death than I had ever been before.

I was only skin and bones. My weight was under a hundred pounds. Each night as I dragged myself to the barracks in a half-stupor, hungry and exhausted I wondered how I would find the strength to rise in the morning.

I knew I was close to the end when once again I got "lucky". With new transports arriving daily and the machines for killing working day and night and still not able to murder all the victims the Nazis were changing the crews at the killing stations frequently in the hope that the next crew would be frightened enough to work 105   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro faster.

The Nazis knew prisoners could work the crematoriums, the ovens, the fire pits and the bath houses for just so long. They tried to guess when the breaking point was approaching so they could murder the kommandos before there was a slowdown or rebellion. How the new crews were selected depended on the Nazis mood on any given day.

I heard rumors for several days about a change in the bath house workers and hoped I could stay alive long enough to have a chance to be picked. I had no delusions about the work or my eventual fate if I were selected for the work. Still, I wanted to be chosen because it could add days of life. If I were not chosen I knew I would die very soon.

One morning they ordered the men in my work gang to strip and line up for an inspection. There were over a hundred of us. We were naked. The SS officer walked slowly down the line looking us over. He had a slight smile as if he were enjoying some private joke that none of us could understand. The suspense was awful. The minutes ticked away in my head as he walked in and out of the rows. Suddenly stopping in front of a prisoner, he shouted, "Hey You!" and poked the man viciously in the chest with his finger.

106   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro

That shout and blow became a sentence of death or an assignment to kommandos of the bath house, gas chamber or crematorium. If the poke in the chest did not knock you off your feet you had the new assignment. If you fell over they shot you before you could get back on your feet. It was as simple as that.

I waited my turn, certain he was going to poke me and just as certain that I did not have enough strength to remain standing. I felt a sense of impending doom and utter despair as the officer approached. I was counting away the last seconds of my life when I heard "Hey you!", felt the blow on my chest like the kick of a mule yet somehow I remained standing.

"Lucky"? How can such a word apply? I was reborn on the spot. For some reason G-D was watching out for me and decided I was to live a while longer. I fell in line with the others who had passed the test and followed the Kapo to my new assignment.

I never understood the Nazi concept of cleanliness. I do not think any of us did. The Nazis constantly lectured us on the subject. They made insane rules and killed people who broke them. They took tremendous pride in the neatness of their uniforms and their bathed bodies even while they soaked their hands in blood with their orgies of killing. They boasted even as they destroyed 107   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro themselves with drugs and alcohol and forced victims to submit to the filthiest, most barbaric sexual acts. It was one of the ironies that made up their world, the world they forced on us.

To Nazis the prisoners were less than nothing. We were things, commodities, to be used until it was our turn to be slaughtered, but because of their fetish for cleanliness they insisted we be disinfected often.

The whole idea was insane. There we were, forced to sleep on mangy straw that could not be kept free of lice or other vermin. We had no water for washing. We were forced to share filthy, open pit privvies so dirty we all suffered from burning rashes of herpes, excema and a thousand other skin ailments. Still they forced us into the stinging vats of "disinfectant" and swabbed our raw flesh with kerosene. It was torture in the name of "cleanliness".

My assignment on the new job was with the bath house kommando. I worked at one of the large disinfectant tanks that was filled with murky water infused with zyklon-B, the killer gas they used in the gas chambers. Every hour, all day long, prisoners were marched to the bath house. There they were ordered to strip and stand naked while we soaked their bundle of clothes in the vat.

After a while we fished out the bundles and handed 108   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro them back at random. If their Kapo was in a good mood he gave the prisoners a few moments to exchange with each other for proper sizes, if not they struggled into what they had been given.

The prisoner' clothes were no cleaner afterwards, but for a day or two they carried the lingering odor of Zyklon-B, one of the smells of death that hung in the air.

There were schedules for men, schedules for women and schedules for newcomers.

When fresh transports arrived with women who were assumed to still be healthy there was usually a large group of SS on hand to do with them as they pleased. At such times every prisoner anywhere in the area tried to be invisible. If anyone even looked as if he were watching, that he disapproved or was passing judgement, they would kill him brutally.

I had been working in the bath house a few weeks when my kommando was reassigned. We were taken to a different barracks and told we would be going to work at five in the afternoon. That meant we would be working all night. There was speculation about the new work, a lot of rumors, but none of us knew for sure. We only knew it would be grissly or they would have told us what it was.

109   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro

All of us knew the gas chambers were not killing fast enough to suit the SS or meet the quotas. The ovens were not burning to capacity and we knew the Nazis would have to do something to correct the situation. Such inefficiency offended their sensibilities. They wanted more bodies, so they turned a barracks into a death house.

Each day a thousand to twelve hundred newly arrived, unsuspecting women were put there and given a bowl of hearty soup and a slice of bread thick with real butter, something the killers knew no starving prisoner could resist.

An hour or two later all the women were dead, poisoned by the butter. It was the job of my kommando to remove the bodies, load them on carts and wheel them to the ovens. Then we returned to the death barracks to help scrub away the evidence and prepare for the next day's victims who would devour the poisoned bread and butter.

When we were finished our Kapo marched us to the bath house and gave us an extra ration of sausage or bread before we lay down and tried to sleep.

On days the killing barracks was not used I was put to work in the undressing shed, where those who were to die in the gas chambers were taken to undress.

110   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro

The floors of the building were made of loose bricks pressed lightly into sand. The construction was part of the Nazis plan.

After all the clothing was sorted and the shed emptied a search under the loose bricks always turned up treasures. In the sand we found everything from diamonds and gold coins, to family photographs, bits of food and good luck charms. Even as our people approached certain death they could not believe what was happening to them. They thought of escape and returning to retrieve their valuables.

Searching the shed was always a torture of temptation. All of us prisoners assigned to the undressing shed knew they were watching us and would search us as we left. I knew if I was caught with anything forbidden I would be killed. Some of us took the chance and got away with it, others died in the attempt. I did not want to give away my life for a trinket. I weighed my chances, decided the odds were too heavily against me. I took only what I could eat on the spot, cram into my mouth and swallow if I was approached by a guard or suddenly ordered to strip for a search.

With those little bits of food found in the shed and the bread and sausage we received when we emptied and cleaned the death barracks, my whole kommando 111   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro soon began to put on the weight, not much, but enough to show. That was a crime from the Nazi point of view.

One day an officer noticed our condition and decided to make an example of us all. "Fat pigs", he shouted as he ordered the guards to give us twenty-five lashes each before reassigning us to harder work.

The lashes hurt. As my flesh was bitten and torn by the leather strap my soul cried in torment, but as it turned out it was a small price to pay for my life.

From the moment I was transported out of Meidzyrzec my eventual death was the only certainty in my life. I would die and that death could come at any time, but not with the certainty that went with an assignment to the bath house kommando. How long would it have been before the Nazis decided to kill us and change that kommando? Maybe I could have worked another week or month, certainly not more.

My reprieve, harsh and painful as it was, saved my life. Again I was "lucky".

In Meidzyrzec the Jewish Council decided who would stay, who would go. After the final round up, when the town was made Judenrein and the members of the council were herded into the cattlecars along with the rest of us, it was the Nazis who made the selections. 112   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro My father went to Treblinka to die while Abraham and I went to Majdanek to survive yet another selection on the train platform. Every day in every camp I was part of that process. I should have become used to the selections, but never could.

Some were worse than others. So much depended on how low I was at the time, but the selections I dreaded most were the ones in Birkeneau each time the Nazis decided to get rid of some of us.

The selection was always on a Saturday morning. Suddenly the barracks would fill with guards and Kapos shouting, forcing us to strip and line up outside. Sometimes, as if it were a funny joke that we would enjoy, they let us think they were skipping a week. They waited until the regular morning count was finished and we were about to be marched away to work, before ordering us to strip for a selection. At those times a particularly bitter taste would fill my mouth as I called myself a fool for having given in to that momentary sense of relief. Then it would pass and I would steel myself for the selection that could cost me my life.

It did not matter whether it was winter or summer, freezing or not, naked and alone I stood in my place and waited. I could sense when the officer was approaching. With all the time in the world one of those self appointed 113   A Time In The life Of Israel Szapiro angels of death would stroll along and with a flick of his wrist or a nod pass sentence.

Live or die. His judgement was based on sores and lesions, rashes, signs of illness or an expression that displeased him.

Who could survive such scrutiny?

With the sanitary conditions so bad, not enough food to sustain a person, with no real medical attention, constant fatigue from being over-worked and the burden of our fears, none of us were healthy, none could be certain of survival. The only thing I could do was hope they would fill the quota before they reached me. Because that was what it was all about. They decided before the selection how many they wanted to get rid of and they picked that number of people. There were even times when the officer, growing impatient with the process simply counted off the last few dozen and sent them to their death.

I worried about every selection, but the Saturday after my transfer from the bath house kommando, with my body torn by the twenty-five lashes, caused the most fear. My whole body was black and blue. The welts from the whip criss-crossed my back and had broken the flesh. Until I healed I knew I would be a dead man in a selection.

114   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro

Again I was "lucky". The Nazis skipped that week and by the time they ordered us to strip and line up enough time had passed so the whip marks were fading and looked like old scars. I still carried some of the additional weight I had picked up during my weeks with the bath house kommando. All in all I looked healthier than most.

I was assigned to a wagon kommando and was harnessed, along with a dozen others, to a big wagon that we pulled all day as we delivered packages around the camp. It was such backbreaking, mindless work that the Nazis considered it a punishment. My crime was looking healthy, but the assignment was not as bad as many others I had been forced to endure and it had advantages.

Spurred by a Kapo and his whip we pulled the wagon from one section of the camp to another, loading and unloading, loading and unloading from early morning until dark. We took breaks only while the Kapo waited for a signature or paper work. It was one of the few times we were thankful for the Nazi obsession with details and having everything in triplicate.

As with every assignment, I did my best to blend in, to be as inconspicuous as possible so I would not draw attention and the blows that usually came with attracting 115   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro attention. All the men on the Kommando did the same, but we also kept our eyes and ears open. As human "horses" we went all over the camp. During stops, while the Kapo went to take care of the papers I was able, with little risk, to carry messages and deliver small items for prisoners who bartered with each other. Despite the high risk there were always prisoners in camp who could not resist going into some sort of business. Every camp had an underground market and everyone in my kommando worked for people who ran the one in Birkeneau. Hooked up as we were to the wagon we had to work together and we usually shared the little bits of food and other things we earned.

Those extras enabled me to keep up my strength, despite the heavy work. One again, I figured, I was "lucky".

As 1944 wore on the killing rate increased, but rumors, spread by newly arrived prisoners, about the American invasion of Europe and the frozen Germans out on the Russian steppes, gave me a little hope. It was only a matter of time, I had forced myself to believe, before the Russians and Americans would link up and there would be no more Germany. The real question was whether I could manage to stay alive until then. Once you were dead you were dead. No matter what 116   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro was happening outside the fences, I had to concentrate on keeping alive inside.

One morning after the count I was taken off the wagon kommando and sent back to the bath house kommando. This time I was more aware. I knew what to expect and paid closer attention to the nearby gas chambers and the crematorium. I knew that at any time my assignment could be changed and I would become a Sunderkommando. If that happened I wanted to be prepared, if such a thing were possible. I was also morbidly curious. There was no doubt in my mind that I would end up there as a victim in the near future.

The Sunderkommandos had many duties that cannot be described. Many that I cannot and do not want to remember. They did what they were ordered to do in the face of the clear choice of obeying or dying. Often they had to calm the victims as they entered the "showers". The Nazis did not want a panic that would warn the others waiting their turn.

Those "showers" were an ingenious contraption. They were large brick and cement buildings with drains in the floor and rows of shower heads along the top, out of reach. Soap dishes held bars of soap that were never used. When the doors were closed on the tightly packed, naked victims the room became steamy hot and that triggered 117   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro the choking gas and began the terror-filled moments that ended in death.

The gas came from the center of the "shower" room where a mesh tube, filled with crystals of Zyklon-B, ran from floor to ceiling. When hot air in the room reached them, the crystals became the lethal gas that killed in ten to fifteen minutes. It was a horrible way to die.

After twenty minutes or so the Sunderkommandos opened the big doors to remove the bodies, disentangle them, pry apart people who clung to each other in the final agony. While the bodies were hauled away to be robbed of gold teeth, hair and anything else the Nazis wanted, before they were burned in the crematorium, the "shower" room was hosed clean to prepare for the next victims.

It was a grisly business, unending, unrelenting in its horror, and heart breaking. It was a living death with only one certainty. In a short time it would be the Sunderkommando's turn in the "shower" room, unless they died some other way first. For those of us close enough to fully understand, the fear of being assigned was almost, but not quite, as bad as being forced to be a part of it. We all knew, even though it seemed like a work worse than the inevitable death that followed 118   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro within weeks, that if they chose us we would descend into that hell and obey to stay alive.

Each day I wondered if this were the day, but then once again I got "lucky". The Nazis came to the barracks late one night, woke us and shipped my whole bath house kommando, along with several hundred others, to Buna.

I could not believe what had happened to me. It is only a short distance from Birkeneau to Buna, but the two camps might as well have been on different planets as far as I was concerned. One minute I was a bath house kommando waiting for death and the next I was an ordinary prisoner in a factory camp.

I don't mean that I was out of danger that the Kapos and the guards were not as brutal or that the gallows were not an ever present threat, but the purpose of Birkeneau was to kill, at Buna it was to manufacture synthetic rubber.

At Buna the Nazis supplied labor for I.G. Farben and for that the prisoners had to be fairly healthy and able to think. As a result they fed us a little better than at the other camps and the barracks was not quite as crowded.

Everything is, of course, only a matter of degree. Better food only meant an extra slice of bread every few days and once in a while a little something in the 119   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro soup other than weeds or a moldy potato. To starving men it meant the difference between life and death, hope and despair.

I was assigned to the shop where they were building huge compressors designed to force synthetic rubber through pipelines.

To be doing real work was both a challenge and a joy. I knew I would be helping the Germans if I did the work properly, so, I worked as slowly as I could and sabatoged anything I could. That was the real challenge, leaving out a screw or bolt without being caught or dropping something inside a machine or breaking tools. I knew, as everyone did, that if they caught me I would die, but still, I had to take the chance whenever possible or the ongoing struggle to remain alive would have become meaningless.

1944 was drawing to a close. It was Christmas day. Most of the civilian workers, the German technicians and the laborers recruited in other countries, were home with their families or in their living quarters away from the complex. Production was stopped and the prisoners were given a rare day off.

I was outside in front of the barracks, just standing there enjoying the luxury of not having a kapo standing over me in the middle of the day, when all at once the 120   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro sky was full of airplanes. American bombers were coming straight at us. It was a beautiful sight.

The day was frosty, cold and clear. The sirens blaring to warn the guards and civilian workers had no affect on the bombers. They kept coming toward us, growing larger and larger as they drew near. There was bright sunshine and the strings of bombs, dropping from those airplanes, looked like Christmas ornaments that exploded as they landed on the factory.

When the "all clear" sounded I was rushed, with all the others, to the factory and put to work clearing the rubble. the compressor shop, had been heavily damaged. The cylinders for the big compressors had been destroyed and my shop was out of business until new cylinders could be located.

While the Farben people searched for new parts I was put to work high in the rafters connecting pipes. It was the best job I ever had in any camp. I had to work high off the ground on narrow ledges. The guards and Kapos could barely see me up there. They were afraid, because of the height, to come up to check on us. There were two other prisoners and two civilians, but they did not bother me and for hours. There were times when I could almost forget I was a prisoner.

Actually I did not let myself forget, as much as I 121   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro would have liked to, at least for a little while. It was a luxury I could not afford, not if I wanted to keep on living. I forced myself to keep my mind on what I was doing and to concentrate on obeying orders, doing as I was told. That and being "lucky" had kept me alive and I wanted to continue to live.

When the new parts arrived I went back to work in the compressor shop, but it was not the same as before, nothing was. The Nazis knew the bombers would return. Everyone, guards and prisoners alike, worked with one eye on the sky. Soon the bombers were coming at least once a day. Each time I was locked into one of the tiny, underground rooms, they had made us dig in the factory floor. Then the guards and civilians ran to their more secure shelters.

As the bombs dropped almost directly overhead and the walls shook and rattled I huddled with the other prisoners, praying we would not be buried alive by a direct hit or burned up by a fire bomb. It was a strange feeling because at the same time we were hoping the bombers would destroy the factory. They were our only hope for freedom, even as they lessened our chances of surviving.

By January 1945 rumor had the Russians almost to the gates of Auschwitz. The Buna factory was no 122   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro longer operational and I could sense by the way the Germans were acting that they were getting ready to do something. I was afraid they would shoot us all and prayed they would just leave. It seemed the logical thing for them to do, but nothing the Nazis did was logical.

To kill so many thousand quickly was impossible and the SS and the guards, we all reasoned, would want to put as much distance between themselves and us prisoners as they could. The alternative was too horrible to contemplate, but in our hearts we knew we were not taking into account the extent of Nazi fanaticism and their determination to rid the world of Jews.

The speculation ended in the middle of a bitterly cold night. we were ordered out of the barracks, given a loaf of bread and marched out of the camp. The icy wind cut through my thin, striped paper uniform. My feet felt frozen in the clumsy, wooden shoes. Combined with the deep snow it made the forced march almost unbearable.

Once again I was living with thoughts of momentary death. Our SS guards seemed frightened and edgy. I could feel them looking over their shoulders at an imaginary, pursuing enemy. Their nervousness made them even more brutal if such a thing were possible.

123   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro

After a short time of struggling through the snow drifts we were exhausted and disoriented. The guards kept pushing us and cursing, but still people were dropping to the ground.

It soon became obvious the Nazis did not intend to leave any witnesses behind or allow anyone to escape. The people on the ground were ordered to their feet. Those that did not obey were shot where they lay.

I was determined not to die. I fought to keep going, but I could feel my will giving way to despair. the future seemed to stretch only as far as the few feet of snow in front of me. I could not force my mind to focus on anything beyond that.

My vision was blurred. I thought I was still on my feet, still moving, but when I saw a guard coming at me with a big German shepherd dragging at his leash, I wondered.

I knew it was the end and I hoped the guard would shoot me before the dog tore me apart. My life was, in my mind, measured by how long it would take that guard to reach me and he seemed to be coming very fast as the dog pulled him toward me. It wasn't until they were almost on top of me that I realized I had misunderstood.

The German shepherd was the pet of the Lager Kommandant 124   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro of Auschwitz. The guard wanted to be rid of the dog and ordered me to take charge of him.

With this powerful creature to lean on I was alive again. He pulled me through the snowdrifts. When there was something we had to climb over I gripped his collar and up and over we went. Whenever we were allowed to stop for a short rest the dog rooted in the ground and found bits of food some of the prisoners or guards had thrown away. In the snow, even to a starving man, the least little thing became more than could be carried. The dog found much of this food and allowed me to take some from him.

Best of all I discovered that the guards were afraid of the dog and did not trust him. The dog had been trained to kill and they had all seen it in action. No one wanted to get close to him, so they all stayed away from me.

Finally, after a three day march, we reached Glivitsch, a railroad center in southwest Poland. There, all the prisoners were herded into a big yard to wait. They did not tell us what we were waiting for. We had no shelter from the cold and snow that cut through our paper uniforms and could find no place to sit or lie down on the frozen, snowy ground without freezing.

The Nazis decision to abandon Buna had been made quickly. The bread they had given us at the beginning of 125   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro the march was the only food they had for us, but the bread had weighed the prisoners down and most of us had been forced to throw it away. I had shared some scraps with the dog, but in the freezing cold of a forced march calories burn up fast. It looked like we would all end up starving to death. Then I realized the guards had set up a small kitchen for themselves, and I still had the dog.

Desperate, I risked my life by going there and demanding food for the LagerKommandant's dog. They gave me enough to keep us both alive for the six days we waited in the railroad yard.

By the seventh day the yard was in chaos. From incoming prisoners, who seemed to be arriving from all over Poland, we learned the Russians and Americans were closing in from every direction. The Germans were emptying the camps as fast as they could and bringing the prisoners to the railroad yard.

There were twelve thousand of us in the yard when the boxcars, most with high sides and no roof, arrived. We were forced to climb aboard and were jammed in so tight no one could sit or move about.

There was no doubt in my mind, as the train pulled out of the yard, that I was on a death train. Over the years in the camps I had seen enough of them come and 126   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro go to sense when one was being formed. And as it rolled on day after day my fears seemed confirmed. The only question seemed to be whether they were taking us somewhere to kill us or were going to just ride until we were all dead.

It was so bitterly cold. I was numb for hours at a time and then suddenly in terrible pain. Life was suspended. Nothing seemed real. When the train was shunted to a siding, as it often was, I looked out at the bleak countryside and wondered if I were still on earth.

Every hour those of us with strength enough tossed the stiffened bodies of the dead over the side to give the living a little more space.

At some of the desolate sidings peasants seemed to materialize from nowhere, to stand and stare at us with sad, disbelieving eyes. They said nothing. We said nothing. We were ghosts to them, or so it seemed from the way they looked at us. It took all our strength to stick our hands out in a pleading gesture and all our spirit to hope they would understand. In most places they did. They tossed us bits of bread and vegetables and then went away, vanishing back into the countryside.

Worst of all was the thirst and the life sustaining, tantalizing snow just beyond our reach. Those of us who were close to the outside tried to scoop up snow in our 127   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro cups hoping to gather enough moisture to sustain ourselves, but, because the outside was where you caught the worst of the bitter winds, most of the time you could not stay there for long enough to do any good. The numbness and tingling pains would drive you back before anything reached your cup. Still we tried because it was all we could do.

The train seemed to be wandering aimlessly through Poland, Austria and Czechoslovakia. We could tell where we were from the names on the train stations we passed.

At some point in the first or second day our train crossed the Polish border and, although I did not know it at the time, I had left Poland forever.

Finally we crossed into Germany and the train stopped inside the gates of the Dora concentration camp. We were not far from Berlin. Dora was another of the slave labor manufacturing complexes. Over one hundred thousand prisoners were there working on the V-2 rockets, the buzz bombs that were terrorizing England.

Once again the SS ordered us out onto a train platform. There were six thousand survivors of the train. Six thousand dead had been left along the tracks.

I was in Dora only a short time when I was put on a transport and taken to Tormaline, a camp high in the mountains near Berlin.

128   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro

Every day we saw waves of British and American bombers heading toward the German capitol. The Nazis were trying desperately to carve huge storage tunnels into the mountains so they could empty the ware- houses of Berlin before all their supplies were destroyed by the bombers.

I was put to work on the tunnels along with four hundred other prisoners and several civilian workers. After the weeks I had spent on the death train I was in such bad shape that the heavy construction work seemed more than I could do, but somehow I again found the strength to go on. Having endured so much, and believing help was near, I had a new sense of determination.

We used jackhammers and dynamite to break up the rock. Then we shovelled the rubble into ore cars that were pulled out of the mountain by small steam engines.

I figured out the system and managed to get assigned to the night shift because at night all work stopped when the bombers came over on their way to Berlin. The Germans were afraid a spark from the engine would give away their position. Sometimes, for an entire night, we sat in the tunnel entrance, doing nothing, waiting for the "all clear" I hoped would never sound. For me those hours of rest meant survival. Those hours enabled me to conserve my strength and began to recover from the ordeal 129   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro of the train.

Although we were isolated and cut off from the world we saw the unopposed bombers, heard rumors from new prisoners and could sense the edge of fear and desperation growing in our guards. The atmosphere created hope fed by our own imaginations. What we did not know we made up in wild attempts to sustain our will and courage.

The days became weeks and the news of Russian victories became our lifeline along with the bombers that never seemed to stop their pounding of Berlin. In April the rumor was the Russians had crossed the German border and would soon sweep into Berlin. Toward the middle of April even our guards were admitting the news was true. They were abandoning the tunnel project and planning to move us again.

They told us this time we would go to ships that would take us to Sweden where we would be set free.

It was hard to believe. They were going to set us free.

We believed the Nazis, thinking their only other alternative was to kill us all and figuring they did not have time or the resources. There were too many of us.

The march was to begin at once. They fed us cups of barley soup, a thick broth they said would fortify us for 130   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro the journey and then marched us eighty miles to the banks of the Elbe River. As we left the camp each man was given a loaf of bread. It was another burden to weigh us down, but one we had to carry as long as possible, knowing it could be the difference to living or dying if we were being fooled again. After our initial elation our fears were making us more realistic and doubtful.

The march was a horror for me. As soon as we left camp we were all doubled over cramps and diarehha from the barley soup that was too rich for a body that had survived on weed soup for too many years.

A hundred times I wanted to die, but then anger forced me on. The promise of freedom, even though I doubted it was true, seemed so close, so tantalizing, to die then, to let my tormentors win after I had endured so much, seemed so unfair that the thought forced me on.

In the two days of marching I watched prisoner after prisoner drop in his tracks. A prisoner in front of me pitched forward on his face and lay there. He was barely alive, gasping for breath, but not trying to rise.

A guard seized me as I passed and forced a shovel into my hands. He ordered me to dig a grave. With my bread held under my arm so no one could steal it, I began to dig.

131   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro

The guard was going to make me bury the man alive or join him in the grave. I could not understand why as I scraped away at the frozen ground with the guard standing over me impatiently demanding I dig faster and growing angrier by the moment. I was wondering what I would do when the hole was big enough. I do not know what I would have done if an officer, attracted by the shouting of the angry guard, had not come to see what was happening. He looked at the prisoner on the ground, shot him in the head and walked away without a word.

Eventually we reached the Elbe River where the Nazis had a barge waiting. They gave each of us survivors another chunk of bread and forced us onto the barge. One after another, prodded by the weapons of the guards, we were pushed aboard. There were so many of us that we had to sit with our legs apart as close to the man in front of us as possible to make room until they could not force one more man aboard.

Finally the barge was towed out into the river and headed north, with its human cargo, for fourteen long days. In all that time I had nothing to eat but the piece of bread they gave me as I boarded. I scooped water out of the river to try and quench my thirst and fill my belly with something. Even though the body becomes 132   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro numb it is impossible to get used to hunger or the pain that comes with it. Once again I was on a forced journey where we had to make room for the living by tossing the dead over the side.

When the barge reached its destination the guards roused us from our stupor. They were still dangling the promise of freedom at the end of the journey as we began a twenty-five mile forced march which brought us to a big barn which was standing in the middle of an open field. It seemed a desolate place in the winter, just that old building and the barren fields.

Everyone headed for the large drafty barn hoping to get out of the cold. The guards took one side for themselves and forced the prisoners into the other.

Starving, we all fell to our hands and knees and began sifting through the straw looking for stray bits of grain that we could eat while the guards, evidently also hungry, killed one of their Dobermans and began roasting the dog meat.

After a taste of the roasted dog they spit it on the floor in disgust and tossed the rest of the meat away. In a mad scramble I managed to get a piece of the roasted dog.

It was the best meal I ever ate.

On the third day a kettle, probably used for making 133   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro soap, was found and the guards allowed us to build a fire underneath it. We took turnips from a pile in the barnyard and cooked a turnip soup.

I had one cup and tried to get back on line for another, even though I knew it was risky, but I was almost too hungry to care, that soup smelled and tasted so good. A guard recognized me and smashed me on top of the head with an axe handle.

I was stunned and went reeling backwards, but I managed to remain on my feet. The pain was blinding. I was in danger of losing consciousness, but my instincts told me if I fell, even to my knees I would be beaten to death. Somehow I managed to stagger out of sight before collapsing.

We were in the barnyard for six weeks, living on turnip soup, before they told us the ships for Sweden were in the harbor and we would soon be free.

As we filed out of the barnyard to begin the eight mile march to the Black Sea port of Neustad we filled our pockets with red beets from the fields. We did not know if we could carry them, but we had no way of knowing when we would have our next bite of food and we had to try.

Once again I was part of a march. This time, as so many times before, the Nazis set a cruel pace and forced 134   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro us to keep up at gunpoint. Soon the beets began weighing us down. Those beets became heavier with each step we began dropping them by the road.side All the beets were gone before we had marched a mile. It seemed a tragic loss.

We halted at the outskirts of the Black Sea town of Neustad-Holstein. My thoughts alternating between the promised freedom and the beets I no longer possessed, the beets that would have stilled my gnawing hunger.

For two days we waited on outskirts of the town. Then we were ferried out beyond the harbor to the "Caparcona", a pre-war passenger ship that had made regular trips between Germany and South America before it was turned into a troopship by the Nazis. We climbed aboard and the guards forced us below. All day the Germans kept bringing prisoners and forcing them into the holds until there were over seven thousand of us on the ship. It was then that I realized they were not taking us to freedom, that we were all going to die. Conditions in that hold were gruesome. There were no toilets. With everyone packed in so tight and no air to breath, I became resigned to my fate. My senses too dulled to even recognize the irony of having gone through so much just to die so close to the end.

Somehow I made it through the night. We were still 135   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro anchored about five miles off shore on the morning of May 3,1945. We were waiting for whatever would happen, not knowing how the Nazis planned to make us the actors in the final act. It was later that we found out the ship was loaded with dynamite, enough to blow us up without a trace.

About mid-morning the guards lowered fifty gallon drums of soup to us. There was almost a riot as the prisoners fought to get a cupfull. I wanted that soup as badly as any of them, but something warned me of a greater danger and I realized that with all the movement toward the center of the hold where the soup was I could climb to the deck.

I reached the top just in time to see British fighter planes skimming across the water, coming at us from the west. They headed straight for the ship and dropped their bombs before zooming up and out of sight.

There were explosions below deck, a burst of flames and dense clouds of black smoke covered everything. The metal decks became unbearable hot. The ship began to list and I tightened my grip on the rail while I listened to the screams of those trapped below. Soon the screams stopped. It became very quiet.

Some of the men who had made it to the deck jumped into the water and tried to swim to shore. The 136   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro water was freezing. I learned later that none of them made it. Others climbed on top of pieces of floating debris and then went back into the water to drown as other drowning men tried to join them and forced the debris to sink.

Several of us, thinking our best hope was to stay with the ship, remained on deck until the heat became too much. Then we went into the water, staying close to the ship. When we became chilled by the frozen water we made our way back on board. By going back and forth that way I managed to stay alive.

At noon on May3,1945, a few hours after the bombing of the Caparcona, British ground forces reached Neustad.

They saw the plume of smoke from our burning ship and learned from the townspeople that the ship had been loaded with prisoners. They seized every vessel in the harbor and came to rescue us. A tugboat came over the horizon and steamed toward us, stopping every few minutes to pluck people out of the water. Some were from our ship, some from the other vessels that had been loaded with prisoners. When they came alongside our ship hands reached out to help us aboard. It was so crowded I never caught a glimpse of our rescuers, just of the other prisoners. I never even found out if they were 137   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro British or German.

The tugboat took us to the docks. A British soldier embraced me as I stepped onto land and for the first time in forty-three months I realized was free.

Only later did I learn about that last bit of "luck". Of the seven thousand on board the Caparcona they were able to find less than three hundred.

I was Israel Szapiro once again although the tattoo on my arm meant I would also be #129594 for the rest of my life.

In town the prisoners running around like wild animals. That's what we were, wild, wild animals. I saw a British tank and I went over to it. The soldiers shouted to me and waved. They were laughing and crying at the same time and giving away things, anything and everything they possessed.

I asked for jelly and they gave me jelly. Jelly-jelly-jelly. I did not realize until that moment how much I had dreamed about jelly, about bread with jelly all those days and months that had become years.

I followed some of the others to the railroad station where there was a freight train. One boxcar was full of eggs, another swiss cheese and another was filled with whiskey. We broke them open and helped ourselves. The British soldiers stood nearby watching and making 138   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro sure no one tried to stop us.

I put a wheel of cheese on my shoulder and walked around with it just for the sheer joy of possessing more than I could eat. We made a fire on the platform in a big drum, put a tin on top and kept a hundred eggs frying at once. There was also a warehouse filled with sacks of sugar. When we wanted some we went and slashed a bag open just to take a handful.

It was an orgy, a delicious feast. For some those first few hours were too much. Drunk with freedom, with the excitement of it all, some of those who were freed keeled over with strokes or died of heart attacks. Others ate themselves to death, gorging on the rich foods their systems could not accept. Those wanting revenge more than food attacked any German they could find and the British soldiers did not try and stop them.

Then it was time to restore order.

The German navy base at Neustad was turned into a displaced persons camp, a camp with rules, but no fences and no guards. I was free to stay or free to go anywhere in the Allied Zone. I could have returned to Poland, but what for? No one was left. "Why should I go back to cry?", I asked myself.

I still hoped to find, or be found by my brother or some other relative. The only way that could happen, I 139   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro realized, was to be registered and stay where I could be located.

Every time a new list of freed prisoners reached Neustad I searched for a familiar name, but never found any. All my family had been swallowed up. All that was left was me and my cousins in Alliance, Nebraska. Never having met those American cousins I felt my real family was the friends who shared my dormitory. They were the only ones who had shared the ordeal of the camps. We were the only ones who could understand each other's suffering. I had not known any of them in the camps, but after we were freed we quickly became united with strong bonds of friendship.

I wanted to go to America, but so did hundreds of thousands of others and America was not taking us in so quickly. With no other plans in mind I decided to wait my turn, if I could, and in the meantime recover my strength, catch up on living, continue to search for my family and make the best of things.

Life went on. I slowly became accustomed to living again. I began to feel I should be thinking about a future, but it was not time yet. For the while, at least, I was content to get by day by day and try to get used to not thinking of dying.

My cousins in Nebraska sent me packages with 140   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro things I could trade. I learned that the Germans were willing to buy anything that resembled coffee and I did a brisk trade by taking the old grounds from our coffee machine and mixing them with the coffee my cousins sent. It was a satisfactory substitute. I had a lot of regular customers. I also sold them cigarettes that my friends and I bought from the British and began to think a little about what to do with the rest of my life. I knew I was still young, but I felt very old.

On the day of freedom four women who had been prisoners were picked up by the British from one of the other ships. They came to our building and were assigned to a room. Three were sisters and the fourth, Clara Zaltzman, was their friend. At first they were afraid of me because I was in charge of the barracks and they thought I might be a German, but after they realized I was Jewish and an ex-prisoner just like they were, we became friends. Then Clara and I realized we were in love.

We had nothing, but each other when we decided to marry. On my part the decision made after I realized there were other men interested in Clara and if I did not set things straight I might lose her. So I decided I better marry her while I still had the chance. On September 4, 1945 the German mayor of Neustad married us in a 141   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro civil ceremony.

We were man and wife, but somehow, after all we had been through, to be married by a German, that way, did not seem enough.

We were Jews., although we had not yet started practicing the religion as we had before the war and did not know if we ever would. Still, we felt we had our faith and if after all we had suffered for being Jews our faith had not been destroyed then we had to be married by a rabbi in a religious ceremony.

That was not as easy a thing to do in those days. As far as we knew all the Rabbis of Europe had been killed and we did not know if any had come from other places to replace them. We searched for one anyway and learned that there was a British Rabbi stationed at Bergen-Belsen, a hundred miles away.

It was October 12,1945. Standing in an open coal car, dressed in our best, Clara and I clung to each other while the train took us to Bergen-Belsen. We were covered by a blanket to keep the coal dust off our clothes, but it did little good. We thought of other trains we had been on as we looked out at the blackened, bomb­scarred landscape.

We saw abandoned bombed out buildings, deserted vehicles, shattered trees, farms unattended their fields 142   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro choked with weeds, defeated, homeless people wandering aimlessly, wrapped in rags and then, suddenly, a flourishing farm that seemed unaware there had ever been a war.

Holding each other we tried to find the reality that had eluded us for so many years, the years of our youth. We were still young, but that youth had been taken from us and destroyed and we did know how to replace it.

A wind blew and I pulled the blanket closer around us, but nothing could keep the coal dust from covering us. By the time we were halfway to our destination we were black from head to toe.

It was frustrating. We only had a hundred miles to travel, but everything moved so slowly and we were in such a hurry. Too much of our time had already been taken from us. There was nothing we could do. All trains moved slowly through the checkpoints controlled by the British, Russians and Americans and no trains moved after dark.

Our train stopped for the night at the town of Cele. We left our seats, spread our blanket and slept on the floor in the waiting room.

We were sitting on a bench waiting to re-board when Clara saw something in my expression that saddened her. Trying to bring me back from the private hell I could not always escape, she took a piece of news- paper and 143   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro wrote a note in the space between the lines. It was written in Polish. Much is lost in translation, but this is roughly what it said,

My dearest Husband,

The road to happiness is paved with roses. We must get to it through thorns...but the end of this road is full of happiness worth the largest sacrifice. Do not wrinkle your dear face and try not to think of those who could not live and suffered, or those who not too long ago disappeared in the waves of war. Take life just like it is and then you will always be satisfied with it.

Your very true being in the world,

Clara

The note made me realize I was not alone and that when one of my moods came over me it affected Clara. I promised myself I would try to fight them. Her caring lifted my spirits.

When we finally reached Bergen-Belsen we went to the apartment of friends to rest a while. These were people who had been liberated in Neustad with us, who had then moved to the displaced persons center set up where the Bergen-Belsen camp had been. Wanting the wedding to be as traditional as possible Clara went to 144   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro prepare herself in the mikvah, but the hut containing the ritual bath had been vandalized and could not be used. She came back laughing and feeling lucky because the water would have been ice cold.

I gave a stranger cigarettes for a gold ring, and found out later it was brass. That did not surprise me. After all we had been through in the camps we had learned to trust no one. When we did, it seemed, we always got brass instead of gold.

We had to stop people in the hallway of our friends dormitory until we gathered enough men for a minyon, the ritual gathering of ten that was needed for an official religious ceremony. We took our place in front of the Rabbi. He was a British major and looked just like any other British officer. If there was a difference it was because he was a Jew and was trying to understand.

He read the prayers. We sipped the traditional wine and I crushed the glass for good luck. The Rabbi gave his blessing and a mazeltoff, we kissed and at last we felt truly married.

It was still early in the day. We returned to the railroad station to hurry back to Neustad.

The train was so crowded we could not find a place inside. I climbed up on a coupling gripped an overhead pipe with one hand and our suitcase with the other. Clara 145   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro held onto me.

That night the train stopped in a town that had been all but destroyed by the bombers. There were no accommodations. We went to a bomb shelter, found space under a bench and spread our blankets. In the morning we resumed our journey.

Back at Neustad we were impatient to get on with our lives. Our minds were filled with the promise of America and we felt there was not a moment we could afford to lose.

Having applied to emmigratebefore the war I figured my number would soon come up because so many had died, but I was an innocent and did not understand. I learned soon enough how hard it was to get into a country that had shut her doors on us was in no hurry to open them.

We were still there, in the barracks in Neustad, when our daughter, Tania, was born.

Still we waited. Finally we had to face the fact that the United States did not want us and we began thinking about alternatives.

When we were offered the chance to go to Canada we accepted. I had been studying to be a machinist, but when word got around that Canada was going to allow one thousand tailors in I learned how to make buttonholes 146   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro and passed the test.

To start our new life, in the new world, we became Mr. & Mrs. Irving Shapiro.

Our daughter, Marlene, was born in Montreal.

It was ten years later, after we had settled in Canada, that we were finally given permission to emigrate to the United States. The dream was still so strong that we accepted the opportunity and once again moved to a new and different life.

I took a job with my cousin. We became American citizens. Our third child, Hershel, was born in Alliance, Nebraska. We settled in Gering, Nebraska. After a while I went into business for myself and we prospered.

But that is a story about another place and another time in the life of Irving Shapiro.

This is the story as it is remembered after more than forty years of trying to forget, to keep it out of my thoughts and dreams that would turn into nightmares if I let them. My desire was to forget and get on with life.

But the time came when that was impossible. I had to try and tell my story so that the past will not be forgotten and the future generations will know.

If any of the facts are distorted it is only because the memory dims and the mind plays tricks and there is, too often, too much pain in the memories.

147   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro

AUTHOR'S REFLECTIONS

Numbers are dispassionate. They are also overwhelming, numbing. They rob us of our ability to comprehend the individual tragedies. We simply do not possess the capacity to absorb death, terror, the ultimate cruelty on a large scale, certainly not a scale as unprecedented as the collective murders that have become known as the HOLOCAUST.

There are many estimates of the number of individuals who were murdered in Auschwitz, Treblinka, Sobibor and the other camps, of the number killed by the Eisengruppen, the death squads that prowled the Russian steppes, following behind the advancing German army. No one knows how many are buried in the mass graves.

The number is so staggering, is counted in so many millions that it almost seems irrelevant to seek the exact number. "What difference does it make if the number is five and a half, six or nine million?" What difference because who can deal with millions of murders? Who can deal with the responsibility for four hundred and fifty thousand murders being attributed to one man, Adolph Eichmann?

Eichmann, more than any other Nazi brought to "justice" epitomized the incongruity of trying to exchange a 148   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro number for a number, a life for...how many lives?

Taking Eichmann's life makes little sense unless we accept the fact that Eichmann was found guilty, sentenced and executed for the murder of Mala Szapiro. That he was found guilty, sentenced and executed for the murder of Hershel Szapiro. That he was executed for the murder of Abraham Szapiro....for the murder of Meyer Ruzal....There is neither paper nor ink enough for the entire list.

But why? Will there always be only questions? Questions?

What if the Germans had not been obsessed with a desire to destroy our people and had not diverted so much manpower, thought and raw material from their war effort? What if the murder squads had been in the trenches fighting instead of roaming far behind the lines murdering innocent people? How many bullets that could have been fired against the Allies were used instead to kill the hundred thousand civilians who died at Babi Yar?

Who would have won the war if the SS death squads that ran rampant in western Russia, had fired their weapons at military targets instead? How many troops could have been transported to the siege of Stalingrad, in the railroad cars that took our Jewish people to the death 149   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro camps? What could the builders of the gas chambers and crematoriums and the manufacturers of the killing gases contributed to the Nazi war effort if they had not been so involved in the murder of the innocent? How many men could have been released for the German armies if the Nazis had utilized the skills of the Jewish craftsmen that they chose instead to kill?

Would the "buzz bombs", the rockets that terrorized England as the war neared its end, have been developed two years sooner? Would they have been armed with the atomic devices if the German physicists and mathematicians had not been forced to flee or die? Would the energy used to create the ghettos and the manpower used to keep the Jewish people behind the walls have made the difference between victory and defeat for the Nazis?

Perhaps, just perhaps, the answer to these questions could lead to the answer to The Question ...Why?....Why?...Why?

If Jews are G-d's chosen people, chosen to bear witness, then could it be possible they are chosen for other purposes as well? If the demonic forces of Hitler and his killers were defeated because they allowed themselves to be diverted by their hatred, could that not have been part of G-d's plan?

What if the Nazis were sent to earth as a warning, to 150   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro give man a glimpse of what will happen if he does not change his ways? What if they were a plague sent by G-d, a plague much like the ten visited on Egypt just before Moses led his people out of bondage?

Perhaps the Nazis were a genuine threat and the fate of humanity did hang in the balance while the fighting raged. What if the Nazi preoccupation with the "Final Solution" made the difference? Who could say the price was too high? Who could judge? The victims, but who else?

Hitler preached, both from the speaker's platform and the pages of Mein Kampf, that Jews were members of a race not a religion. From "race" Jews quickly became, in his lexicon, a "Conquering, parasitic race" and that was his justification for seeking to exterminate all the Jews of the earth.

As long as there is a history of Hitler's times the world will wonder why this zealot wanted so badly to destroy the Jewish people that in the end he was willing to destroy himself?

Hitler organized his people, gave them himself as a hero, a god. He gave them the Jewish people as scapegoat, as the sacrificial lamb, one that they could attack with impunity.

He took them step by step into a war and then made 151   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro that war a side issue to his attempt to exterminate the Jewish people to achieve his "Final Solution".

He called on all the experts, those with knowledge of gas chambers, the builders of crematoriums, people who could deal with the logistics of transporting millions of people and began recruiting his executioners and they obeyed because it was a "Feurhrer Order".

The "revisionist historians", those Nazi apologists who try to prove the Holocaust never happened ask, "But where is the evidence of this Feurhrer Order? If Hitler gave such an order why is there not a shred of written evidence?

They then build a case. There was no Feurhrer Order, there was no master plan for a "Final Solution". There was only an undirected strategy that somehow got out of hand.

But what is the point of the argument? It simply means that Hitler and his followers were either one shade of monster or another. At best it is an argument of degree.

Mein Kampf bears witness to that fact as do the actions of the mobs that were exhorted to a frenzy of violence and hatred.

Every Jewish virtue became a crime in Hitler's eyes and his justification. Commenting on the ability of the 152   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro Jewish people to absorb punishment and the resilient way they seemed to bounce back from adversity, he wrote, "No persecution can deter him [Jews] from his type of human exploitation, nor can drive him away; every persecution he is back again in a short time, and just the same as before."

But Hitler was wrong. The survivors have not returned in any number to Germany and she is a poorer nation, spiritually and intellectually, as a result.

The Jews of Poland have not returned and there is no country in Europe with less hope and less future. Before the Nazis invaded and rounded up the Jewish people with the help of so many of the Polish peasants, there were more than three and a half million Polish Jews in Poland, their native land. Today there are less than ten thousand.

Poland is a nation struggling, under Russian domination to retain a national identity. It is an effort doomed to failure because the Polish soul died in the gas chambers and was turned to smoke and ash in the fires. Poland is still an anti-Semetic nation, but it does not seem to matter much because she is little more than a ghost haunted by fears and guilt.

Who were the guilty parties? The Polish people who would not protect their Jewish neighbors? The Nazis 153   A Time In The Life Of Israel Szapiro who relentlessly pursued their innocent victims? The countries of the free world who refused to intercede and made Hitler bolder by their indifference? Or does the shame belong to the entire human race? Are we, in fact, a defective species? What is there in each of us that made it possible, as Irving said, on a beautiful day, under a hot sun and blue sky, to kill innocents and make it seem that nature was happy with their misery?

Levi is Irving's grandson. He was born in Nebraska. We originally wrote Irving's story as, A letter to Levi, a combination of narrative and letters that we scraped because it attempted to explain what cannot be explained.

In one letter we wrote,

Levi,. no question about it, your grandfather's story will make you sad, but it should also make you proud and make you think. It would all be too easy if mired in guilt the world allowed the Holocaust to become a weight on its conscience, a bad feeling that refused to go away. To do so would allow for excuses, and, eventually for the rationalizations that make bad feelings go away. The Holocaust should not be thought of as a "German crime" or a "Polish crime". It was a crime of humankind.

Man may think he governs by law, but he is, in reality, little more than a mindless, violent creature if he 154   A Time In The Life of Israel Szapiro does not guide himself by a belief in G-d and brotherhood. We are our brother's keeper, in the truest sense. The moment we forget that we become barbarians, beasts in the guise of man.

155