Jakub's World: A Boy's Story of Loss and Survival in the Holocaust

Darkness

1 Darkness Now standing in wooden wagons pulled by horses, now walking holding the wheels of empty wagons to steady them on hills, the remaining Jews of Bel -ªyce move south down familiar dirt roads through a familiar countryside past villages with familiar names: Ke ˛pa, Skoczyce, Urze ˛dów. The familiar road is strange now and offers no comfort. It leads to an end they neither know nor look for. That intense moment by the synagogue that obliterated their past makes their future unthinkable and suspends them in the present, a terror. The blood of their dead comes to Budzyń first: on a Mercedes diesel SS car, on SS uniforms, on SS Sergeant Feix’s hands—“dirty blood,” “Jews’ blood.” Washed off with water, it soaks into the camp’s earth. Then the living come. A few families—Manfred Heymann with his brother and both parents, luckier than others, perhaps because they were German, not Polish, Jews, as he himself suggested in the testimony he gave in 1955 (preserved in the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw). Vestiges of families, mainly: Pola Grinbaum-Kronisz and her sister, parents, and three brothers murdered in Bel -ªyce by Feix; Herszel Zancberg and his father, mother, and sister murdered in Bel -ªyce by Feix; Jakub by himself, his brother dead in Bel -ªyce; his father absorbed into the depths of Majdanek; his sister Miriam held in Poniatów; his mother and sister Deworah murdered in Bel -ªyce by Feix. 35 36 Jakub’s World Jakub sees a guardhouse in front of a gate at the end of a tree-lined path, sees an open square, four guard towers, a row of windowless barracks, sees black-uniformed Ukrainian guards; sees Feix. As the people walk into the camp, Feix decides fifty more of them are unfit to work. Herszel Zancberg sees the jacket his father had been wearing wheeled back on a wagon into the camp. The original settlement of forty-three brick houses, residential hotel, bathhouse, co-op to which the German occupiers of Poland had given the name Bydzyń had been constructed in 1937 as part of the Polish government’s effort to industrialize the nation in an economically deprived, sparsely populated area of forests, fields, and meadows to house workers at a new ammunitions factory. At the beginning of September 1939, when Germany invaded Poland, the Poles cleared the factory and evacuated the workers. In the summer of 1941, when Germany invaded the Soviet Union, the Germans constructed a row of wooden stables for their horses in a clearing at one edge of the little settlement . By mid-1942, an affiliate of the Heinkel Aircraft Company had taken over the empty ammunitions factory and the SS administrators of Lublin took over the stables to house the Jews who they were going to send to work there. From among the four thousand Jews they were deporting from nearby Kraśnik at the time of the Feast of the Tabernacles (late September 1942), they selected a thousand stronger ones for Heinkel, taking the rest to Sobibór and Belzec to kill them. “We built the camp—put up the barracks and horse stalls, and a barbed wire fence,” Izchak Lamhut testified after the war. To the original row of stables they added a kitchen, a bath, a barracks for women separated by its own wire fence, a latrine at the corner of the compound next to one of the four guard towers; a guard house at the entrance in front of the gate leading into the camp. A wooded area divided the Zwangsarbeitslager (hardlabor camp) from the little settlement in which lived the 37 Darkness German Croatian civilians employed at the Heinkel plant. At the edge of the woods they built barracks for the SS, and in a couple of the brick houses facing the path into the camp they established the Lagerführer’s office and residence. From the Lipowa Street prison in Lublin, they transported around fifty Jewish-Polish prisoners of war, among them tall, red-haired Noah Stockmann whom they made camp elder . He was a thoroughly decent man; interceded with Feix on his fellows’ behalf; attempted to keep people’s spirits up. Samuel Zylberstajn in his memoir remembers Stockmann saying to him and other new arrivals from the Warsaw Ghetto as he paints red crosses on their jackets and pants at Feix’s...