Here are the words of the man with the check book, about the piece that follows. He’d emailed earlier in the day soliciting stories about family secrets. Take his comments with a grain of salt, you might find the piece strangely moving, even if the keeper of the online Reader’s Digest-type site deemed it ‘strangely unmoving’. And, of course, he’s right, the details in those two short paragraphs about the actual slaughter do read like they’re from an encyclopedia. And it would, of course, be peevish of me to point that out to the man who pays good money for things he likes.
“Again, nicely done, but I found this one strangely unmoving. I think the problem (at least for me) is that, since your grandparents never tell their individual stories, you had to rely on online research to find out what happened in August 1943 in this town in Ukraine. The details are horrific, but they’re the kind of thing you find in an encyclopedia. I wish you had some small, personal details of your grandparents’ experience, but I guess the story is that they never told you their story.”
Good guess, brah.
“I’m worried about your grandmother, she’s drinking too much,” my grandfather told me one day, toward the end of their lives. “I bought a new bottle of vodka Monday and now, on Wednesday, it’s almost gone.” I knew my grandmother was a big drinker, apparently the colon cancer she was dying of had done nothing to reduce her thirst for relief.
I was sitting on the terrace later that day, screened from my grandfather’s view. He walked into the living room, bent to open the cabinet below the lamp and took out the vodka bottle. He regarded it for a moment, unscrewed the top and took a long, thirsty drink. He downed it like water. When he was done he calmly wiped his lips and put the bottle away.
“Holy shit,” I recall thinking. I had no idea my grandfather was a drinker. Then again, why wouldn’t he be? He was a Russian Jew who shared an unbearable secret that would never be whispered.
My mother’s parents were Jews from Vishnivetz, a small, six hundred year old town in the Ukraine. They had emigrated to the United States when Warren G. Harding was president. Each had been one of seven children. My grandparents were the only members of their families to leave Vishnivetz, the only two still alive after a brutal night in August of 1943.
I was a boy of about eight when I first learned about the Nazi atrocities, the millions killed. I vividly recall my shock when I first saw the film clips from the death camps.
After watching a guy in a cap wheel a huge wheelbarrow full of jiggling skeletons and dump them down a chute, I’d seen enough. I ran to puke my guts out. My mother cried and tried to console me, but the truth was the truth. Over the years I would read many books on Hitler’s rise to power, the Nazi state and the Final Solution, but as a boy it was just a nightmare that was not to be shared.
Sitting around the dinner table, smiling at my sister and me, were the only two survivors, one from each large family, of a recent episode of mass murder. It was never, ever spoken of.
Vishnivetz still exists, though I doubt there are any Jews there today. I learned the exact fate of my grandparents’ extended family and the rest of the Jews of Vishnivetz only recently, after finding an online source of witness accounts.
The Germans occupied the area in 1942 and forced the Jews of Vishenvetz to construct a ghetto within a very short time frame. I was chilled to read the name of a member of my grandmother’s family, held hostage by the Nazis to force the Jews to keep to the deadline. One boundary of the ghetto, I read with hairs rising on my spine, was the home my grandfather had grown up in.
In August of 1943 the Jews who’d survived more than a year of disease and starvation in the ghetto were marched to a ravine just north of town where each got a bullet in the back of the head. This was after centuries of periodic small scale massacres in Vishnivetz.
On my father’s side, the muddy little hamlet outside of Pinsk where his mother’s family comes from has been erased from the map. No trace of it can be found in English or, as a Polish speaking researcher friend confirmed, in Polish. Everybody there, and the little town itself, disappeared into Mr. Hitler’s famous Night and Fog.
When I asked about these things my father quickly dismissed my concerns. “You act like these things happened to you personally, they didn’t. Those people were mere abstractions, we never knew any of them,” he told me impatiently. “The letters from Europe just stopped coming one day,” he said. My mother was tearful, but said nothing.
Each of the “mere abstractions”, of course, had a name, and a personality, favorite things and things they couldn’t stand. Each was known intimately by my grandparents. Some were funny and generous, others were schmucks, each had certain endearing and maddening qualities. The thing they had in common was the bad luck to remain in those accursed little towns when the Nazis came through the area.
Many years later, not long before she died, my mother told me of her correspondence with her grandfather in Vishnivetz. She used to write to him in Yiddish, which she studied in school. Her grandfather would send her letters and Russian coins. When she was about 14 years old the letters, indeed, stopped coming.
My grandparents are now all long gone, and my parents have followed. It may have been a healthier thing to have discussed these horrors when they were all alive, instead of making the subject off limits, but we cannot remake the past. My childhood took place in a different time, before the importance of grieving was widely understood.
I find myself haunted by this terrible family secret from time to time, and sometimes, when I am feeling very low, I find myself standing by that ravine outside of Vishnivetz, with the other ‘mere abstractions’, waiting for the invitation to kneel for my bullet to the back of the head.
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