Esfir Is Alive Read online

  Praise for Esfir Is Alive

  “Once again Andrea Simon has given us a work of power and poignancy as she narrates the story of a young girl caught up in turmoil of pre-war Poland and then in the dual occupations of the Soviet Union and of Nazi Germany. Her writing is crisp and moving. Her grasp of history is assured and her sensitivity to the historical turmoil as experienced by a young girl is pronounced. Enter this world of darkness, grief and loss with young Esfir and you will experience the depth of evil and the travails of human endurance. The power with which Andrea Simon brings Esfir and her era back to life will only magnify your sense of loss for the world that was and the people who were murdered in the Shoah.” — Michael Berenbaum, director, Sigi Ziering Institute: Exploring the Ethical and Religious Implications of the Holocaust and Professor of Jewish Studies, American Jewish University, Los Angeles, California; former president of the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation

  Praise for Andrea Simon’s Bashert: A Granddaughter’s Holocaust Quest

  “Makes a significant contribution to our understanding and perception of the Holocaust in eastern Poland (Belarus) . . . . Balances impressions of life before and during the Holocaust in eastern Poland with other fragments of family life in the U.S. and other parts of the world from roughly 1915 to the present day. This has the welcome effect of demonstrating the quality, beauty and despair of those lives that were destroyed . . . The very personal approach and the attempt to reconstruct fragments of the quality of life . . . give it a special and enduring quality.”—Dr. Martin Dean, author of Collaboration in the Holocaust

  “Simon’s writing makes us care, care about her, her grandmother, her town and her self-discovery. Pilgrimage is the most ancient of religious rituals, a journey forth that is also a journey into self and Bashert is an admirable account of Simon’s pilgrimage. We learn as she learns, we engage, we remember, we cry out and we even at times laugh. Perhaps the first—or at least one of the first—of a new genre of Holocaust writing that will become more familiar and more urgent as the survivors are no longer with us and their descendants are forced to uncover from history what they once could encounter directly from memory.”—Michael Berenbaum, director, Sigi Ziering Institute: Exploring the Ethical and Religious Implications of the Holocaust and Professor of Jewish Studies, American Jewish University, Los Angeles, California; former president of the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation

  “Bashert is essential reading . . . . Bashert opens our eyes to the personal story of a strong and determined young woman, who lost her home and family . . . and found a new life in America. Masha will take a place in your heart as she did in her granddaughter’s and mine and create a pocket of warmth and pride that will forever remind you of how the strength of one person can change the destiny of an entire family. I urge you to read Bashert, but please be sure to have a hanky at hand.”—Michael D. Fein, editor, The Gantseh Megillah

  “Bashert: A Granddaughter’s Holocaust Quest delivers something much more than a story about the author’s kin. It carries a message that transcends all cultures, races and generations . . . . Ms. Simon’s memoir whispers a warning to all who read it: do not let the past become the future.”—Melanie McMillan, The Litchfield County Times

  Other books by Andrea Simon

  Bashert: A Granddaughter’s Holocaust Quest (University Press of Mississippi, 2002)

  ESFIR IS ALIVE

  Andrea Simon

  © 2016 Andrea Simon

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be

  reproduced or transmitted in any means,

  electronic or mechanical, without permission in

  writing from the publisher.

  978-1-943837-60-1 paperback

  978-1-943837-61-8 epub

  978-1-943837-90-8 mobi

  Includes Glossary of Yiddish Words and Phrases and Reading Guide.

  Cover Design

  by

  Some of the English translations that appear here have been previously published in the following:

  Paper Bridges: Selected Poems of Kadya Molodowsky. Translated, introduced, and edited by Kathryn Hellerstein. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1999. (“Otwock” and “Merciful God”)

  Kartuz-Bereza Yizkor, Our Town Memorial Book. JewishGen, Inc., 1993. (Elizabeta Zilbershtein [Leah Berkovitz], “By the Common Grave” and Reizel Navi Tuchman, “Brona Gora”)

  Bink Books

  a division of

  Bedazzled Ink Publishing, LLC

  Fairfield, California

  http://www.bedazzledink.com

  A novel inspired by a true story of survival.

  Esfir Manevich is a young Jewish girl who lives in the Polish town of Kobrin in 1936. Facing anti-Semitism in public school, Esfir moves in with her charming aunt who runs a boardinghouse in the bustling city of Brest. Being younger than the other boarders, Esfir struggles to find a place in her new life, all the while worrying about her diminishing role in the family she left behind.

  As the years pass, Esfir experiences the bombing of her hometown during the German invasion of 1939. When the Russians overtake the area, Esfir sees many of her socialist relatives and friends become disillusioned by the harsh restrictions. During the German occupation, Esfir and her family are enclosed in a ghetto where they develop heartbreaking methods of survival.

  In the summer of 1942, shortly before Esfir’s thirteenth birthday, the ghetto is liquidated and the inhabitants are forced onto cattle cars destined for the killing fields―and Esfir must face unimaginable horror.

  To the real Esfir Manevich, wherever she may be.

  In the midst of this streaming rain the little half-naked boy jumped onto a boulder, and throwing back his head, all windblown, he put the flat of his hands against his mouth and whistled for all he was worth. His whistling cut the darkness, the rain, and the thunder like a knife, and it kept growing bolder and clearer:

  “I’ll make you listen to me! You will have to hear me!”

  —I.L.Peretz, “My Memoirs”

  PART I

  Polish Rule

  In 1921, a treaty was signed by Poland and Russia that shifted Poland’s borders to include parts of western Belorussia [White Russia] and portions of Ukraine. The formerly named city of Brest-Litovsk or Brisk D’Lita [Brest of Lithuania in Yiddish] was now known in Polish as Brześć nad Bugiem, literally meaning Brest on the River Bug.

  Prologue

  WHEN I WAS five years old, my father, normally a man of precision, drew a crude map of Kobrin and made an “x” to represent our house on Pinsker Street. Though in reality, Pinsker Street (officially called Third of May Street) had its twists and turns, on my father’s map, it was a fairly straight line, parallel to the train station and the Mukhavets River; and, while he fashioned other longer, thicker-ruled streets and double-lined avenues, it was clear to me then that everything important took place on Pinsker Street. I could walk from my house to the market to the synagogue to the Jewish hospital and, when I was older, to my school—even to the old cemetery—in one direction or another, depending on my coming or going. Easy as it was for me to get around, and for my mother Sheyne, a woman of worry, to calmly send me on my way, I was not always happy to follow a prescribed route. Sometimes, I longed to make a sharp right or left turn, and see where that would take me. On occasion, my best friend Gittel and I snuck off for our adventures, dipping our feet in the river or tracking mud on the steps of City Hall. Later, there came a time when Pinsker Street not only changed its name again, but the faces of its inhabitants belonged to strangers and I was lost for the first—and last—time.

  One

  THE PUBLIC PRIMARY school that I attended was a two-story complex of white stone buildings, partially offset
by a picket fence and flanked by large oak trees, and named after the famous Polish leader Józef Pilsudski. There were about forty students in my class, including ten Jews. We sat at long wooden desks, about eight students packed in a row, plus there were a few two-student desks in the front. The buildings were cold and draughty, though shafts of rectangular window light warmed our arms if we sat in their direct path. Even on a day like this, a Saturday in early November 1936, most children, including me, wore sweaters.

  Although the Jewish students were required to go to school on Shabbes, they didn’t have to write. Remaining with their hands folded was enough to show the others that they were different, but the Jewish kids knew they had to be quiet, too. They tried to blend in with the other dark-headed students, forming a kind of Semitic humming chorus, attending the Catholic morning prayers and religious classes.

  All, that is, except for me. At seven, I was next to the youngest of the Jewish students. I was thin and pale, with blond hair and blue eyes, and the priest sometimes confused me with being Polish, as if it were a compliment. But I always fingered my silver Star of David necklace that my father buffed every Sunday night when he polished everything else in the house that was worthy of a shine. It wasn’t only my looks that made me stand out from the other Jewish students; it was the fact that I never quite learned to keep my mouth shut. And that included singing the Catholic hymns, which I only understood this morning not to do when the priest walked down the aisle, stopped in front of me, and, with his bible, slapped me on the head.

  If they were lucky, students brought lunch, including dark break with butter, cheese, or a hard-boiled egg. And if it wasn’t too cold, they sometimes ate in the fenced-in yard, under the mammoth oak trees. The boys often threw acorns at each other.

  On this day, one of the Jewish boys, Berl, had fallen asleep sitting on a bench in the yard after eating his lunch. He woke up when a group of Polish and Belorussian boys pinned down his arms. One of them, from a higher grade, took out a bottle of ink and a brush and painted a cross on Berl’s shirt, while another boy, whom I recognized as the bus driver’s son, Feliks, stuffed crumpled paper in Berl’s large bat-shaped ears. Berl coughed and sputtered, finally spitting on Feliks who punched him in the nose. Blood spurted down Berl’s face onto his white shirt, and the boys disappeared as quickly as cabbage-stuffed rabbits chased by a nap-awoken gardener.

  I was standing on the other end of the yard and ran over to Berl. Taking my sweater that had been draped around my shoulders, I offered him a sleeve to wipe the blood from his face. Berl started to cry and snot leaked from his nose. I cringed when he rubbed it onto my brown woolen sweater sleeve. When Berl seemed able to stand, I returned to my original spot where I had left my notebook. All over the cover, there was ink, the same blue-black color that was on Berl’s shirt. Instead of the boys, though, a half-dozen Polish girls stood in a small circle, pointing at me, singsonging, “the Jew girl,” and cackling like witches.

  Determined not to show them I cared, I took the sweater I had lent Berl and, with the clean sleeve, swiped my notebook cover. Now I had one sleeve red with blood and the other stained with ink. I managed to last the rest of the day, but as soon as school was over, I ran home, looking over my shoulder every few minutes, not sure if I expected the bullying boys or the girls to follow me. I knew one thing: I never wanted to set foot in that school again.

  When I got home, I walked into the parlor and my mother let out a scream, “Esfir Manevich, what happened to you?” She rushed to my side and rubbed her hand over my reddened sleeve. “What is this? Is it blood?”

  “Yes, but it’s not mine.”

  “Not yours? Did you hurt someone?”

  “No!” I screamed, and scampered up the stairs to the attic room I shared with my two sisters, Rivke and Drora. Out of breath, my mother came up behind me and peeled the sweater from my body and ran her fingers along the sweater’s grooves. “This sleeve doesn’t look like blood,” she said, holding her thumb to her nose. “Is this ink?”

  “Don’t you want to know who I spilled ink on?” I said, swearing to myself that I wasn’t going to tell my mother the truth.

  “When your father comes home, he will get to the bottom of this, even if he has to go to your school.”

  My mother knew the right words, and I began to cry, not in a snotty, sobbing way like Berl, but in a quiet, soft manner as if my tear ducts were leaking on their own accord. My mother gave a half-smile and I told her the whole story of Berl and the boys and the witch-like girls, and even the behavior of the priest.

  “I am sorry, Esfir, that you had to endure this. I am proud that you helped Berl, but the next time, you have to ignore these children. You can’t draw attention to yourself. You can’t even sing in church. You could get expelled from school, and worse can happen to our family.”

  Worse? What could happen to them? Could my family go to prison if I sang glory to God, a god that wasn’t Jewish?

  I decided that I wouldn’t admit to my mother that these same girls had taunted me before. I had tried to sit away from them, but last week they caught me near the trash can, and one girl reached inside and grabbed a rotten apple and smushed it into my face. The next day, the girls called me, “Apple Sauce,” and that became their regular name for me. And what I would never confess even to my sisters is that the third day they called me Apple Sauce, I hid in the woods after school and threw an apple at their feet as they walked down the road. They didn’t see me and squealed. I heard one of them say, “That must have been little Casmir.” It disturbed me that they thought they were being pursued by a boy, but I controlled myself and ran home, remembering how my uncle was badly beaten in his bakery because he spoke out against a man comparing him to “Jewish lice.”

  On Monday morning, my father, Avrum, held my hand and took me to school, the first time for both actions. Although terrified of an adult fight, I was thrilled to have this private time with a man who usually said only a few words to me. He had planned on talking to my teacher or the headmaster. Later he described that while he waited for over an hour in a small room, a woman entered whom he thought was my teacher. Instead, it was Berl’s mother coming to complain about what had happened to her son.

  “Mr. Manevich,” Berl’s mother had said, “while my husband and I are very upset over the violence toward our Berl, we are angrier at what the teacher told their class.”

  “And what was that?” my father asked.

  “That the gentiles should not give work to Jewish craftsmen. They should boycott Jewish stores. This teacher even called us Communists.”

  “She may have well called us dirty Jews,” my father said.

  After this remark, my father had excused himself, wished Berl’s mother luck, and walked to my classroom. He opened the door and there was a united murmur.

  “Can I help you?” my teacher asked.

  “I am Esfir’s father and I came to take her home.”

  “Is there something I should know about?” she asked.

  “We are late for a Communist meeting,” he said, giving me a hand-rolling motion, and nodding. I gathered my books and scurried out of the room.

  On our way home, I tried to hold my father’s hand, but he shook it off. His face was red and crinkled, and I knew it wasn’t a good time to ask him anything. When we got in the door, I announced to my mother, “My father came to take me to a Communist meeting.”

  “What?” she said.

  “Papa came to school and announced to the teacher that he came to take me to the meeting.”

  “Are you crazy, Avrum?”

  “She is not going back to that school, now or ever.”

  “Maybe she needs a change,” my mother said.

  “Maybe we all need a change.”

  ONLY TWO DAYS later, after I said good-bye to my sisters and my brother, Velvel, I watched my mother pack a valise, carefully layering my cotton nightgown over two freshly ironed white blouses: my fancy one with a bow and little glass buttons, a
nd my everyday one with embroidered flowers, dots, and vines. Even at seven years old, this was not the first time I had left my home but it was the first time I needed to bring a valise.

  “Now, Esfir,” my mother said in that lecturing voice, “remember Kobrin is not that far away, and you can come home whenever you want.”

  “I know,” I said, afraid to say more because I might cry.

  “And I don’t have to tell you to behave. Your aunt Perl has much to do, and you must help her.”

  I nodded. Aunt Perl owned a boardinghouse in the big city of Brest, or Brisk as we called it in Yiddish. Perl was my mother’s older sister, and about five years ago, she had inherited a large three-story house with an attic when her husband was murdered by a crazy boarder over the weekly rent. Perl had been married by then only seven years. She never remarried and took extra care on my brother, sisters, and me because she had no children.

  Since I was the youngest, and maybe the neediest, Perl liked me best and tried to get me to stay by her, even if she had to come and take me back to Brest herself. This time, one of her former boarders, a cigarette factory owner who went to Kobrin for business, drove Perl to my house in a classy black car, of all things.

  Perl opened our front door, and I flew into her arms. Although she was heavier than my mother, with stout legs and meaty arms, she looked glamorous in a tan pinstriped suit with her sandy hair in curls hanging from a brown wide-brimmed felt hat. Unlike my mother who, according to my sister Drora, the fashion queen, wore shmates, Perl pranced around the room, showing herself off like a magazine model. But Perl didn’t take herself seriously; she was laughing the whole time, saying, “Esfele, shake your feathers. We have a man outside ready to step on the gas.”