Seven-year-old Noike was breathless but duty-bound as he burst into his house to report on the afternoon’s events. He was known as the little yenta, a busybody, always providing daily updates on all of the happenings around the small Polish town of Maciejow. Once he went too far, telling the rabbi when his teenaged aunts were writing on the Sabbath—an act strictly forbidden in the Talmud. His aunts literally dove out of a first-storey window when they saw the rabbi and their five-year-old nephew walking hand-in-hand towards their secret writing place.
“Noikele, there you are,” his mother, Pesel, said as she emerged from her bedroom. She was thirty-three years old with deep blue eyes and wavy brown hair, features young Noike had inherited. When her husband, Kalman, died of pneumonia six years earlier—one year after Noike was born—she became the head of the household. Noike was too young to remember his father but he would never forget how his mother described his hair: “Black as a bumblebee.”
“Where’s Herschel?” Noike was eager to share the latest news with his older brother. He often tagged along with Herschel when his mother was busy minding the fabric store. In recent weeks he had listened to the older boys talk about Germany, Russia, and France—places far from their simple life in Maciejow. Now these places seemed not so distant: real Russian soldiers were in their town.
“Herschel went with Baba and Blima to the store to pack up the rest of the fabrics,” Pesel explained. Baba was her mother; Blima was the eldest of her three children, nearly eleven years old.
“Come, Noikele—we must get everything out before the soldiers arrive!” Pesel took Noike’s hand.
Though Russian soldiers were novel to young Noike, they were only too familiar to his elders, who had witnessed past wars over the border lands. Located in a region called Eastern Volhynia, Maciejow is about 150 miles east of the former border between Poland and Soviet Union. The region had been part of Tzarist Russia but was given to Poland at the end of the First World War. Twenty years later, Stalin was claiming that the Soviet Union had invaded in order to protect its “blood brothers,” but it was clear that the primary goal was to reclaim lost land.
Signs of an imminent invasion had surfaced a few weeks earlier, after refugees and wounded Polish cavalry units fled from western Poland into Maciejow. Townspeople emerged from their homes, offering the Polish soldiers bread and milk. Word later spread that the non-aggression pact between Germany and the Soviet Union, known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Act, included a secret clause to divide Poland in the event of war. Nine days after the pact was signed, Germany invaded the western half of Poland; two weeks later the Soviet Union struck the eastern half of Poland. The Polish Army, poorly equipped to fight a one-front war, let alone a two-front war, fell within weeks.
One of the Red Army’s first orders of business in Maciejow was to order all of the shopkeepers to open their stores and sell their merchandise at a nominal exchange rate: one Polish zloty for every Russian ruble. The soldiers went wild, some purchasing multiple gold watches for themselves, countless silk stockings and slips for their girlfriends. Pesel was one of the lucky merchants. She managed to smuggle most of her inventory back to their home, bundling it into the shape of a mattress and covering it with bedding. Customers who used to come to the store started coming to her home. Blima and Herschel helped cut and wrap the fabrics; Noike often greeted customers.
“Dzien dobry,” Mrs. Shliva said as she stood in the doorway. She was carrying a basket loaded with cheese and butter. “Is your mother home, Noika?” The Poles and Ukrainians pronounced his name “Noika” instead of “Noike.”
Noike nodded his head; he recognized Mrs. Shliva from the store.
“Come in, come in,” Pesel said, overhearing their conversation at the door. “You wanted some fabric for your daughter’s dress? Let’s go to my bedroom; I have a beautiful floral print in mind.”
“Do widzenia, Noika,” Mrs. Shliva smiled as they went to Pesel’s bedroom.
A FEW WEEKS INTO THE OCCUPATION, the Soviet Union sent representatives to install a Communist-style government. Only a select few—mostly Ukrainians who did not appear “too nationalistic,” or Jews who did not seem “too religious” or “too capitalist”—were assigned coveted government positions. Poles would not take part in the new government. Polish elites, intellectuals, and former government officials fled town a few days before the occupation, heeding rumors that they would be arrested by the NKVD—the Soviet secret police—and exiled to Siberia.
The new Communist government shut down the few businesses that remained and put an end to the weekly Der Markt Tag—market day. Jews who were unable to stow away their inventories were devastated by the closures; they were the proprietors of the town’s shoemaking shops, millineries, confectionaries, and most other businesses. These businesses were replaced with state-owned depots, offering only the essentials for communist life. Noike and Herschel would wait in line for hours for a loaf of bread, often returning home with nothing; the poorly operated stores were unable to adapt and keep up with the demand.
WHEN NOIKE RETURNED TO SCHOOL a few weeks later, he met his new teacher, an older Ukrainian woman as fluent in Russian as she was in communist ideology. “Dobroye utro,” she greeted Noike in Russian as he entered the classroom, her hands clasped in front of her broad waist. Noike looked up at the new teacher, unsure how to respond to the foreign words. Dobroye utro sounded similar to Dobyi den, or “Good morning” in Ukrainian, a phrase he often heard when greeting customers at his mother’s store. “Dobroye utro,” he finally said.
The teacher smiled, then greeted the next child in the same manner.
Polish would no longer be spoken in the public schools. The Ukrainian teacher handed out the new Russian textbooks and formally introduced the class to the motherland: a huge map of the Soviet Union was displayed where the Polish one once hung. All of the students were encouraged to join the Young Pioneers, a Communist youth movement that held sports events, showed films, and organized parades. Noike eventually became a member, wearing a red scarf around his neck and waving a big red flag as he marched through town in the annual parade; not understanding the meaning of the Soviet propaganda, he simply wanted to participate in the only activities in town. Pesel allowed her son to take part in the events—refusal would have been deemed anti-communist.
In the two years that followed, many of those who protested the government would disappear in the night, never to be seen again.
3
THE BLACK STORM
Maciejow, Poland. June 1941
Noike pulled his pillow over his head but the bombs were relentless—more frightful than thunder and lightning, more frightful than anything that had ever woken him in the night. He went into his mother’s bedroom and quietly stood near her bed. Sensing someone’s presence, she opened her eyes and softly smiled at her youngest child. “Come baby, come sleep with Momma,” Pesel said, placing a quilt around his ears and holding him until he fell asleep.
The German attack, code named Operation Barbarossa, took the Soviet Union by surprise. Hitler began planning the attack when the Soviet Union expanded westward in the summer of 1940 and occupied Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Romania. The Soviet Union had the largest intelligence network in the world, and yet Stalin refused to believe the countless warnings until hours before the Germans’ first strike. Within a few days the front reached Maciejow.
