Friday Old Country and Beyond Part II

Stolen Years

My father was a fabulous storyteller. His English was fractured - it was by far the worst of his five languages - but storytelling isn't really about vocabulary or grammar. It's about cadence, pacing and tone. Whatever I learned in my gut about narrative, I learned by watching and listening to him as a kid. And I'm nowhere as good as him.

People would come from the neighborhood some nights, and instead of watching TV in their homes or playing cards, would sit in our dining room and just listen. Mostly he told stories about his experiences in World War II. It was a very Homeric thing. My mother would serve coffee, tea and cake and my father would hold court. I'd look at these neighbors mesmerized by my father's words and kvell. Just by sitting at the head of the dining room table and spinning a yarn, he held his audience in rapture.

If you listened to these stories enough times, you noticed that the details kept changing. How much stuff he made up on the fly I don't know. He was a very skillful b.s.'er and to this day I don't know what is truth and what is fiction. In general, he was angry and unhappy with a hair trigger temper, but when he told stories, there was a certain calm in him. You could be around him then and know there wouldn't be an eruption of his unhappiness. And maybe because of that, I liked to be around him when he told stories, just to see him temporarily at peace.

What's interesting to me is that I don't remember most of the stories he told, even though I heard them tens of times over. There was one story he told me privately when I was thinking about going to the Ukraine to visit his home town and he told me that I should never go. I'll save that one for later. I think part of it is in a blog posting a while back.

I'll start with his leaving Ludmir with his female cousin at the beginning of the war in 1939. He was about 20 at the time; she was probably about 17. How they crossed the border into the USSR, a few tens of kilometers east, I don't know. You can get an idea of what that might have been like from reading the autobiography of another Ludmir native entitled Man is Wolf To Man. Many people tried to cross and were unsuccessful. My father never mentioned any difficulty, but he was a very resourceful person, and it seems he already knew Russian fairly well.

They headed East to avoid the war by hoboing on trains and by foot. There were rumors that it was possible to get to America through China so he and his cousin travelled East thousands of miles to Tashkent. A wonderful book about this migration and what life was like in Tashkent is My Mother's Sabbath Days by the Yiddish novelist Chaim Grade (a writer that deserves far more attention than he gets). My father wasn't a reader of books at all and my mother rarely read them (perhaps she read one book every three or four years). But I gave my mother Grade's book one year and she read it straight through in a week. She said to me after that I shouldn't have given it to her, that it made her cry. But then she said to me that she had never seen her own life put so well on paper. "This is truth," she said to me in Yiddish.

Life in Tashkent was miserable. Living conditions were deplorable for the thousands of Jewish immigrants there. And the rumor of getting across into China was just that. People were house communally in makeshift shacks. There was little food. Sanitation was non-existent. People were dying of typhoid and other diseases. My father would go off into the forests and log trees to get by. He said the work was the hardest thing he had ever done by far. The axes were junk. The supervisors were tyrants. It was almost slave labor and many people broke or lost limbs and fingers.

In 1941, the Germans broke their pact with the Russians, and war started anew thousands of miles east. Millions of Russian soldiers were being killed in the battlefields due to the disastrous planning of Stalin and what was left of the military staff that he didn't execute right before and right after the war began.

Stalin was quickly desperate for soldiers of any kind. He "liberated" all Poles in the USSR, which meant that he would use the able bodied males for canon fodder in the Russian Army. In Tashkent, my father tried unsuccessfully to avoid being taken.

As a Polish Jew, he was placed into the Polish-Red Army. His combat unit, led by a Russian Colonel, consisted of a ragtag group of Jews, Armenians, and other undesirables. They were hastily trained and poorly equipped to fight with little in the way of guns or bullets. According to my father, they were immediately sent far west to help protect Leningrad.

It was a hopeless defense, and his troop, in the front lines with little discipline or experience, fell quickly. They had no loyalty to the USSR and knew they were simply there to use up German bullets. My father survived because somehow he became a confidant of the Colonel.

Sometimes in his stories my father would say he was a cook. Other times he would say he knew enough German to listen in on communications with the German soldiers. Who knows what the truth is on this matter? The cook story is kind of funny, because he was simply awful at cooking; I would dread my mother taking trips because of it. And I joked with him more than once that his cooking probably killed as many soldiers in the Polish Red Army as did Hitler. My father loved gallows humor like this. His response usually was that being a cook in the army meant that he had nothing to do since there was never any food.

While my father's troop had little fire in their belly, they marveled at the Russians, who would join arms and surge forward without bullets, crying out their allegiance to Mother Russia as they fell. What could produce such loyalty in the face of such a hopeless situation? He'd never seen such a thing.

Next Friday I'll continue this story. I'll end this post with what my father always said when someone asked about his age. He would tell them his age according to his citizenship papers (which was off by at least two years but that's another story for later). But then he'd always have a qualifier. It would go something like this.

"How old are you, Leon?"

"Forty six, but in truth I'm thirty nine."

"Why is that?"

"The war. I didn't live for seven years. They don't count."

Badabump. That was my father's kind of humor.