hid their prayer clothes and books, placing them behind curtains, inside furniture, under couch cushions. Noike stuffed his prayer book inside his coat.
Within seconds two SS officers stormed into the living room with their guns drawn. They wore riding pants, black leather boots, and tall hats with the Totenkopf symbol, the skull and crossbones, the same uniform worn by officers who had raided Noike’s grandfather’s house the previous summer.
“Jewish assemblies are forbidden!” one officer shouted in German; the other panned his gun across the room.
The worshippers remained silent.
“Raus, raus!” he ordered the group. “Everyone must leave immediately!”
Noike kept his head bowed as he followed his neighbors out of the house.
No one was arrested that day; no one was instantly shot. Hours later the reason for the reprieve became clear: a large-scale massacre, an aktion, was planned for Monday. One leak came from a Jewish woman, Sheva Berelson, who worked as a maid at German headquarters and had befriended a soldier in recent months. Upon learning that Jewish workers would not be needed that Monday, she asked her soldier friend about the sudden change in schedule. He confided that the situation would get much worse for the Jews in Maciejow—pregnant women would soon be removed from the Jewish clinics and shot.
Another leak came from a Ukrainian hospital administrator who was close friends with Avram Avruch, a Jewish doctor who studied medicine in Switzerland and was fluent in German. Avram was no longer allowed to treat non-Jewish patients—a racial law introduced by the Germans—but he wrote medical reports and completed other hospital administrative tasks that had to be done in German. The hospital administrator told Avram that the next aktion would be the final one.
Noike’s mother, Pesel, tried to maintain a sense of calm around her children, even as she prepared for the inevitable. She went from house to house, meeting with close friends and relatives; they exchanged what little information they had on the raids and their strategies for survival. After everything had been arranged, Pesel shared her plans with her children: “We are going to stay with Gitel Silverberg for a few days. She has built a hiding place in her basement and will let us stay there until the next aktion is over. The rebbe also has a secret room, but it’s too small for all of us.”
Hiding places had saved many people during the last aktion; this plan seemed to be their only hope. Gitel Silverberg, a second cousin, started building her hiding place a few months earlier, a short time after a Polish woman returned from the neighboring town of Kovel and told her Jewish friends about corpses lying in the streets. The Germans had massacred 15,000 Jews, decimating Kovel’s entire Jewish population.
“But what about all of our things?” Noike’s sister Blima asked.
Many homes had been ransacked during the raids of the previous summer. The police had been the biggest culprits but many peasants from the neighboring villages had also plundered. Anything left out in the open was for the taking: dishes, armoires, mattresses, bed frames, clothing—even children’s toys.
“We can bring some blankets and food,” Pesel said. “But the police will be suspicious if they see us leaving the house with anything else. We’ll hide the silver and photographs later tonight.” One room was left unfinished when Pesel expanded their home before the war; she planned to bury the silver, photographs, and other family heirlooms under its bare, clay floor.
The next afternoon the four of them left their home, keeping everything but their most sentimental valuables in place. They locked the door and crossed town as if they were on an ordinary social call, visiting neighbors for afternoon tea. But instead of walking as one group, they split into two: Noike and his mother walked through one side of the square; Herschel and Blima walked through the other. Noike followed his mother, clutching at his pillow.
They entered the hiding place through an outhouse behind Gitel Silverberg’s grocery store. Pesel and Herschel went inside first, pushing the toilet aside to reveal a tiny dirt entrance carved into the floor. One by one they squeezed through the hole and climbed down a long, narrow ladder. At the base of the ladder was a short passageway that led into a room.
The basement was crowded with at least fifty people, mostly women with young children, the only demographics left in Maciejow. It was dark but in one corner Noike could make out Gitel Silverberg’s lively brown eyes and warm smile. She was wearing a long, black dress and had a babushka over her hair like his mother. He also saw his brother’s friend Haim Rosenberg sitting with his mother and sister.
Pesel led them through the basement until she found an open spot away from the original entrance. Gitel had sealed off and painted the door when they created the hiding place but one could still see the street through small cracks along the bottom. Pesel laid a blanket across the cool cement floor, trying to secure enough room for her family to sleep later that night. Noike sat down with his mother while Herschel and Blima wandered off to another corner and searched for friends.
There was little to do in the basement: moving around too much would create noise; talking too much would create noise. Most people huddled in small groups, whispering to each other, eventually nodding off in the darkness as nighttime approached. Pesel started humming as she stroked Noike’s back. As a young girl she sang with the local Yiddish theater group; it was there that she met her husband Kalman, a talented violinist and actor who died less than two years after Noike was born. She stopped performing many years ago but she still sang around her family. That evening, she sang a familiar lullaby to young Noike:
Pretty like the moon
Bright like the stars
From Heaven you were
Sent to me as a present.
Noike leaned against his mother and imagined lying in his bed at home, nestled under a thick layer of goose down bedding. Soothed by the lullaby, he was starting to fall asleep when he heard Blima talking to his mother.
“We’re going to hide in the Pearlman’s attic for the rest of the night,” Blima whispered, motioning to a group of teenagers gathering near the entrance to the hiding place. “We’ll head to the woods before sunrise—some of the boys have built a bunker.” Many of the teenagers who had escaped to the woods during the previous raids had managed to survive. In the forests they could occasionally breathe fresh air and would have somewhere to run if discovered.
“Blimele, I don’t think it’s such a good idea,” Pesel said, shaking her head. “We should all stay together.”
Pesel eventually resigned herself to Blima’s decision. Children were no longer children in those days; the fight for survival forced them to think and act like adults. Noike reached his arms out to embrace his sister. She bent down and placed a kiss on his forehead as he hugged her legs, which were covered in layers of wool stockings and long underwear. He watched intently as she crossed the room then disappeared down the passageway.
GUNSHOTS SHATTERED THE EARLY MORNING SILENCE. Some people in the basement had been sleeping but most had stayed awake all night, unable to rest knowing that the aktion was imminent. Women grabbed their children and hurried into the darkest corners of the basement, barricading themselves behind boxes and wooden crates. Herschel and the other teenage boys ran towards the original entrance, taking turns to peek through the cracks and provide updates for the group. “They shot Esther!” one of the boys announced.
Esther and
