By now, more survivors had begun to emerge and were being tended to by the soldiers. There were maybe 15 survivors in all, including one I recognized from school. He was Menachem Brettschneider, whom we called Chemye. I was thinking how terrible he looked in his tattered clothes hanging from his scrawny body, and then I realized that I must look just as bad.
My father, whose subsequent survival was as miraculous as my own, served as my pillar of strength throughout the period of our ordeal, except for the several times when we were separated by circumstances and I had to carry on without him. I was able to survive at key moments only because of his actions, strategic thinking and constant encouragement.
Tateh climbed up into the wagon with our parcels and Nikolai covered him completely with straw. Then he lifted me up into the open cab. “You sit on my right so that when we pass through the checkpoint you will be on the side away from the guard,” he said.
Then away we went, pulled by his single horse down the main street of the ghetto, on our way out of town. Nikolai pulled the horse to a stop at the ghetto checkpoint. A guard with a clipboard gave a cursory glance at Nikolai’s wagon, seeing an ordinary delivery man and his boy, on a return trip with an empty wagon.
In the twilight, Miroshka takes me to Olenka’s gravesite, where I pay my respects and speak to Olenka in her grave, explaining my decision to have her honored in Jerusalem.
Providing help to people in need should not be an unusual impulse. Yet what made Olenka’s acts exceptional is that she risked recriminations from her neighbors and the authorities for showing any kindness to Jews. If the Germans had known what she was doing, she might have been arrested, tortured or worse. Her home could have been ransacked or burned.
A scholar, William Helmreich, who made a study of the subject in his book Against All Odds, provides a list of the character traits he believes were held in common by Holocaust survivors who successfully adapted to life in America.
In some combination, they exhibited: flexibility, assertiveness, tenacity, optimism, intelligence, distancing ability, group consciousness, assimilating the knowledge that they survived, finding meaning in their life, and courage.
I checked out the action at the registration office on the first day. I noticed that there was a young Jewish man working there whom I had seen around town since the time of the liberation. He was hard to miss since he was tall and walked with a limp.
I knew he was related to the Weidenfelds, one of the merchant families in Skala, and had been educated at the free high school. Having survived with several family members in bunkers, he was now living in town and working for the government. He could not be drafted because of his infirmity.
Skala's strategic location on the western bank of the river Zbrucz, the historical border between the Russian and Austrian empires until World War I, and after that between newly independent Poland and the recently created Soviet Union, made it a hub of transit and cross-border commerce, including an active smuggling economy that benefited the Jews.
Over time, the full story of what happened would become known. The transport from Skala went first to Janovska, where a selection was made and some were kept at the labor camp there. The rest went on to Belzec and, by the next day, had been killed.
Unlike better-known death camps like Sobibor, Treblinka and Auschwitz, the Germans succeeded in erasing most traces of their murderous actions at Belzec. The buildings were dismantled and human remains incinerated before the territory was recaptured by the Red Army in 1944.
It was on one of these days [when we were reassigned to the border guards] that Tateh had a run-in with the infamous Artur Engel, the corrupt Zollgrenzschutz officer who was well known in Skala for extorting valuables from Jewish families, frequently in the company of a snarling German shepherd.
If there was anyone who was the personification of evil in Skala, even more than Hitler himself, it was Artur Engel.
Jewish journalist and interfaith activist; co-author of Live Another Day