An Overshadowed Holocaust Story. Dedicated to Yom HaShoah - Israel’s Holocaust Memorial Day.

April 24, 2023

By: Joseph Puder

[Editor’s note: The piece below is dedicated to Yom HaShoah – Israel’s Holocaust Memorial Day, a day which is marked across the country every year as a national holiday and day of remembrance. This year, Yom HaShoah in Israel took place from sundown on Monday, April 17 to sundown on Tuesday, April 18.]

One chapter of the Holocaust story that has been overshadowed and barely touched upon was the story of the Jews from eastern Europe, primarily from Poland, who survived the Holocaust by moving east into the wilderness of Siberia. Stalin, the Soviet dictator, and murderer of millions, was a hardened antisemite. His idea of shipping the Jews to Siberia was not necessarily to save them from the German Nazis, but to use them as slave labor. Regardless however, it saved the lives of most of the Jews fleeing to the east.

The vast majority of Holocaust surviving Polish Jews, numbering about 250000 out of the 3.3 million in pre-WWII Poland, were those escaping east and ending up in Siberia. My family was one of them. Perhaps in a unique way, my parents had two children during the Holocaust, my  brothers, and their survival was a miracle.

The prevailing wisdom among Galician Jews was that the Russians were primitive if not barbarians, and that the Soviet Union was a Communist hell. The Germans were viewed as more cultured and civilized, who produced great musicians, philosophers, and scientists. My grandfather, whom I never had a chance to know, (my father’s dad Shmaryahu Yaakov) was a Berlin educated teacher who spoke 9 languages and taught in local Ulanow schools (located east of Krakow and northwest of Lvov), in what was known as Galicia. His experience as a young man during WWI made him and his daughters (my father’s beautiful sisters Sarah and Leah) believe that escaping eastward would be madness.

On August 24, 1939, in a surprise move that stunned both the pro-Soviet world as well as the western democracies, the Molotov Ribbentrop Agreement was signed. It dismembered Poland by dividing it between Germany and the Soviet Union. The Russians reached the dividing line of the San River first crossed to the western side before the German Nazis got there. Among them was a Jewish officer who knocked on the doors of Jewish homes in Ulanow and urged the Jews to flee east. He would say to them “The Nazis would kill you if you stayed.”

While the Nazi troops may not have come yet to Ulanow, the Luftwaffe, or the Nazi air force did. The Stuka dive bombers terrorized the people. My parents’ house was partially destroyed by a bomb, and my mother was quick to sense that it was a sign from G-d that they must leave immediately. My eldest brother Zeev was a small baby at the time and my parents were lucky to be alive. The bomb landed not far from the baby’s crib, but no physical harm occurred.

My father did not want to be separated from his dad and sisters. (His three brothers were elsewhere in Poland, with his eldest brother Noah, serving as an officer in the Polish army.)  My mother, however, insisted, “We are not staying here any longer.” Fortunately, she prevailed. So, they joined with others, mostly Jews marching east, some on wagons, others on foot.  Ahead of them was a Red Army convoy.

The Red Army kept the Jewish refugees in something resembling a holding pen, my father, Menachem, anxious about his dad, slipped out of the camp and walked back to Ulanow, an appreciable distance. At the border between the Russian and the German lines, a Nazi soldier stopped my dad, slapped his face, and turned him back to the Russian lines. In fact, that violent act by the German soldier ultimately saved his life. Had he gone into Ulanow, he would have been rounded up, and likely murdered.

As they continued the march east, they found themselves in the Ukraine. Exhausted and hungry, they stumbled upon a Ukrainian inn to pass the cold night. The extended family, that now included my mother’s parents and some of her siblings, were fast asleep when my mother, Zipporah, heard the noise of sharpening knives. She could hear the Ukrainian innkeeper and his sons speak about the loot that awaited them after finishing off the sleeping Jews. A light sleeper, and tending to her infant son, she understood what was going to happen as the night progressed. She slowly slinked out of the inn along with Zeev to a nearby Soviet military post.  She ran amok-like knowing that the fate of her husband and her parents depended on her reaching for help. She reached a Soviet guard-post and in half Polish and Russian, she explained that the Ukrainian innkeeper and his sons were going to murder the whole family.  The two Soviet soldiers sensing the panic in this beautiful woman, and appreciating her courage, agreed to leave their post and accompanied my mother. They caught the Ukrainians in time, and red-handed, and shot them.

A few months later, the Jewish refugees were shipped to Siberia. They were housed in the most primitive labor camps. Within months many perished of hunger, cold, and lack of adequate clothing. The intellectuals were the first to die. Since there was no need for writers, and thinkers, and the work to be done was mostly outdoors, it took an immediate toll on these people. Folks who had trades like tailors, carpenters, shoemakers, mechanics, etc. were recruited to provide the needs of the Red Army. They made uniforms, and shoes, and received an extra loaf of bread. Sanitary conditions, however, were virtually non-existent. For Stalin and the KGB, the Jews were essentially free labor to be exploited. Although the Russian soldiers were not the cruel and sadistic German Nazis, the labor camps for the Jews were harsh places.

In Siberia, the cold and hunger stifled much of the cultural life of the Jews. Still, babies were born including my brother Baruch. My mother had to feed two children now with a meager diet of potatoes and turnips. Observing the Jewish dietary laws, pork and shellfish she would not touch, not that any meat or foul was available. Willpower alone kept my parents going and having two small children made them determined to survive. Eventually, allowed by  permission from the Soviet authorities, they joined my mother’s parents in Uzbekistan.

My father’s dad, my grandfather, a renowned and beloved teacher, was murdered by the Nazi Germans in a roundup of Jews. Together, 1500 of them, including my grandfather were shot and buried in a common grave. My father’s two sisters and their children who remained in Ulanow, were sent to the Belzec death camp, and gassed. My dad’s brother Noah was killed in battle, his wife and daughter murdered. His other brother Hersh was executed by the Gestapo in Katowice.

After the war, my parents were allowed to be repatriated to Poland, but learning that father’s family was murdered, they bypassed Poland and ended up in A DP (Displaced Persons) camp in Germany. As soon as they were able to, they were smuggled by the Bricha operation, (Palestinian later Israeli soldiers of the Jewish Brigade), to Italy, and from there to the new Jewish state of Israel.

Eventually, my dad connected with his surviving brother, Samuel, who remained in Poland, and in 1956, made Aliyah to Israel.

My parents story exemplifies the voyage from Holocaust in Europe to redemption in the Jewish state of Israel.