Crossing the River

Preface

Preface I didn’t really want to leave that morning, to emerge from the dim warmth of our only room and my mother, to prepare to depart. But I had to. All the arrangements had been made, and now everything depended on getting past the sentries successfully. It was a clear, crisp dawn in early spring and we may have had something to eat before setting out. Near the house I was befriended by a puppy that ran after us, and I was torn—here at last was a dog that could be mine. I pleaded with Mother to let me go back just long enough to shut the pup in our room so that if my escape failed this morning, as it had before, then at least I would have my very own dog for the first time in years. But this time my exit was fast and smooth. The German officer was absent, and the roll call was supervised only by our people, with no interference from the guards. A few more steps and we had already reached the riverbank. Oars cut through the calm water, and I looked around me, wonderstruck. After years in the ghetto, suddenly a river, so much space, and me to sail upon it, like long ago at summer camp. As we neared the other bank, my mother quietly removed the two yellow patches, the threads of which she had previously cut and were now fastened only with a safety pin. Her instructions were clear: once we reached the other bank I was to march without stopping through the Lithuanians standing there, cross the road, and go up the path that led into the hills. All alone, I was to walk without raising suspicion and without looking back. Further up the path, a woman would meet me and tell me what to do. Everything went as planned, except that there was no woman waiting for me on the path. I proceeded according to my mother’s instructions, going deeper into the hills, farther and farther from the riverbank and my mother. Only then did a figure with a sealed face approach me, and as she passed me she whispered that I should continue slowly; she would soon return and join me. A short while later I was following her up a steep path, and I soon found myself in the house of an elderly Lithuanian woman named Julija. All this occurred so quickly and so easily that I scarcely grasped what had happened to me in such a short period of time. I am not sure even today, after so x Preface many years, that I have fully digested what happened to me that morning. But the next day I received the first letter from my mother, written on a rolled-up scrap of paper, to be read and then burned: “I watched you move away, my child,” she wrote, and I will never forget this, “climbing all by yourself onto the bank of the river, walking past guards and people on your way to freedom. A day will come when a film will be made about your miraculous escape from the ghetto.” Like Moses in the bulrushes I was cast by Mother onto the shore of life. I therefore dedicate this story to my mother, who gave me life twice, but was unable to save her own even once. Map 1. Kovno (Kaunas) Vicinity 1941–44 Map 2. Kovno Ghetto 1941–44 The ghetto was reduced in four phases. (The full ghetto, as of August 15, 1941, is represented on this map by the combinations of sections A–E.) Phase A: The removal of the small ghetto plus the wooden bridge, October 4, 1941 Phase B: The northwest suburb removal, January 11, 1942 Phase C: Another north removal, May 1, 1942 Phase D: The removal of Slobodka, plus the “bottleneck,” December 23, 1943 Phase E: The rest— the fi nal shrunken ghetto until its destruction on July 13, 1944 Shalom’s Route: 1 Our fi rst living location in the ghetto 2 Our next living location in the ghetto 3 Crossing the river (April 12, 1944) 4 Hiding place on Green Hill 5 PilzFabrik —my mother’s workplace 6 My mother’s possible route to visit her children 7 My sister’s hiding place ...