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Chapter 02 – Mother

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“And no language of poetry exists that can articulate our tragedy on the written page”
Uri Zvi Greenberg

On the night of September 25, 1939, we waited for Father, who was late in coming home. None of us knew where he had been taken or for what purpose or when he would return. Night fell. My mother was gripped in fear and she took me into her arms. I was the youngest of the siblings. My oldest sister, Ita, aged twelve, tried to instill calm, embracing her two younger sisters, Sara and Zipporah. With tears in their eyes, they huddled together in the center of the bed near my mother. We awaited the unknown.

Heavy gunfire shattered the quiet of the night. Shots were heard at increasingly shorter intervals. Suddenly, the door opened and Father entered, exhausted and perspiring, a look of desperation on his face. “The accursed Germans are slaughtering us mercilessly, cruelly and without cause,” I heard him whisper to my mother. Father went into the kitchen, seeking to satisfy his hunger. Afterwards, he joined us in bed. We lay in tense anticipation of the next day. The volleys of gunfire that echoed in the air were constant, not ceasing for a minute. Not one of us fell asleep during that night.

s arms, drifting between sleep and wakefulness. Every attempt to close our eyes and sleep was interrupted by the sound of bullets and the roar of cars and tanks. It seemed as if everything was aimed at our house. With every burst of fire, my mother would embrace wails of fear.

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Chapter 01 – An Inferno of Explosions

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An Inferno of Explosions

“For God called up the slaughter and the spring together, the slayer slew, the blossom burst, and it was sunny weather!”

“Be’Ir ha-Haregah” (“The City of Slaughter”), H.N. Bialik

I will remember that particular day, September 5, 1939, as long as I live. I was a little boy. The non-stop German shelling of my native city, Pultusk, Poland, had been going on for days. I sat trembling in fear with my sisters, huddled under a blanket in a corner of the room in my parents’ home, trying to close my ears and shut my eyes to the noises and the flashes of the explosions. This is how we spent the entire day, with exploding bombs and the roar of planes in the background.

My parents’ and sisters’ eyes spoke volumes; they radiated fear and desperation. Shells went off one after another, shaking the walls of the house. The screams and cries of both children and adults came from every direction.

On September 7, 1939, I heard the tank tracks and engines of the Nazi occupying forces’ vehicles moving along the roads of Pultusk unimpeded. The Polish resistance collapsed and the Nazis took control of the whole city. No one guessed that the life of a vibrant Jewish community was about to be extinguished on that day. Within nineteen days, every trace of the existence of a city on the banks of the Narew River, steeped in green tranquility, was eradicated. One thousand years of Jewish life in Europe and the unique Jewish enterprise on that continent likewise ended.

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