I Shall Live by Henry Orenstein Page B

them. They continued down the street, looking for more Jews.
    Our landlady came to the foot of the attic stairs and called, “They’re gone. Hurry, your father needs help.” We ran downstairs. Father was sitting on the sofa, the top of his head covered with blood. “Don’t worry, it’s not bad,” he reassured us. We cleaned and bandaged the cut, which was superficial, while our landlady told us what had happened.
    The SS officer had been angry at not finding any men in the house except for Father, and ordered him to get up from the sofa. “I’m sick. I can’t go to work,” Father replied. The German put his revolver right to Father’s temple and said,
“Verfluchte Jude
[Damned Jew], you come or I’ll shoot you.” “Go ahead and shoot,” Father answered. “I can’t go. I’m sick.” The German then struck Father on the head with the butt of his gun, spat, repeated “Verfluchte Jude,” and walked out, followed by the two Ukrainians.
    As she recounted this, the landlady shook her head. “Your father is a
meshugene
(crazy). He tells a German, ‘Go ahead and shoot.’ I thought he was a dead man for sure.” Once again Father had demonstrated his extraordinary coolness and toughness; how many men would refuse to obey an order with a gun to their heads?—especially when at the time it seemed to be merely a matter of a day’s work.
    We learned within an hour or so that the Germans and their Ukrainian helpers had gone searching through the main Jewish section of Ołyka, taken all the men they could find, about four or five hundred, loaded them into trucks, and driven off. The men’s families were not particularly concerned; most thought they would be back by the end of the day. By evening, when the men had not yet returned, their families were beginning to worry, but not for their lives; it was more a question of their being hungry and perhaps mistreated.
    The following morning a man came back with a bone-chilling tale. A Ukrainian school friend of one of the Jewish boys who had been taken away told his parents that from a distance, just outside the town, he had seen the Germans and the Ukrainians shoot all the Jews they had taken to “work” and bury them in ditches left over from World War I.
    The general reaction was of disbelief. One of the men startedshouting, “He is a liar, an anti-Semite! He’s trying to torture us with worry. The Germans wouldn’t do that.” Sam, always the pessimist, thought the boy might be telling the truth. Felek and I didn’t believe it. Father didn’t say much; perhaps he agreed with Sam but didn’t want to worry us. So many men had been taken away that in about half of all the Jewish families in Ołyka someone was gone—a father, a son, a son-in-law, an uncle, a cousin.
    They waited nervously all that day, but there was still no news from the men. By next morning the nightmare was becoming a reality. One of the Ukrainian police confided in his girlfriend that it was true, the Jews had been killed. She in turn repeated the story to a Jewish friend of hers. Even then, faced with this confirmation, many people refused to believe it. They still thought the stories were being spread by anti-Semites who wanted to scare the Jews.
    But as days passed and none of the men were heard from, the terrible truth had to be accepted—especially since we were now hearing similar stories from other nearby towns. Worse yet, actual eyewitness accounts of the mass killings of thousands and thousands of Jews, including women and children, were coming from the Russian side. A wounded German officer on the way home from the Russian front told one of the men working at the Ołyka train station of an unbelievable slaughter in Kiev: a hundred thousand Jews—men, women, and children—murdered in a ravine. *
    This was the first time we had heard of mass