5th of Tammuz, 1946

5 Tammuz,



In 1946, Jewish refugees from the Holocaust, with no other place to go, returned to their hometown of Kielce, Poland -- and were attacked by the townspeople in a bloody pogrom that left 42 Jews dead and 80 wounded. The pogrom began when rumors spread that Jews had kidnapped a Polish child. Polish policemen and soldiers entered the Jewish residences and began the violence; the Jews were then attacked outside by mobs in a fray that lasted five hours. Some 3 million Polish Jews had been murdered in the Holocaust, yet this pogrom -- occurring 15 months after the end of World War II -- was a horrific aftershock.

When The Very Last Survivor Fades Away

The Holiest Generation


rav-moshe-feinstein src="http://matzav.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/rav-moshe-feinstein.jpg" width=160 height=126>By Isaac Steven Herschkopf

I could not have been more than 4 or 5 when I asked her. It seemed to me, at the time, to be an innocent, straightforward question: “Mommy, when do I get my number?”

I was, of course, upset when she burst into tears and ran out of the kitchen, but I was also confused. This was Washington Heights in the 1950s. It was an enclave of survivors. Every adult I knew had a number. Even my teenage sister had one in blue ink tattooed on her forearm.

They were as ubiquitous on the benches of Riverside Drive as they were on the footpaths of Fort Tryon Park. If you saw an adult with some sort of hat on his head, he invariably also had a number on his arm. In the summer, when the community traveled en masse to Catskill bungalow colonies, or to Rockaway beaches, the numbers came too.

I presumed it was a ceremonious part of becoming bar mitzvah, or perhaps graduation from Breuer’s or Soloveichik, our local yeshivas. No one appeared to be embarrassed by their number. ARG! I never saw anyone try to cover it up when they went swimming. It seemed to be a matter of fact part of life.

When, as children, we would ask our parents why there was a “Mother’s Day” and a “Father’s Day,” but no “Children’s Day,” the automatic response was “Every day is ‘Children’s Day’!” In Washington Heights, in the ’50s, every day was Yom HaShoah.

Ironically enough, at the same time, no day was Yom HaShoah. The commemoration, as it exists today, was not around then. Breuer’s and Soloveichik consisted almost exclusively of children of survivors, yet neither school had any assembly, or recognition of any type, of the Shoah.

The very word Shoah didn’t exist. The word Holocaust did, but it was never invoked. When on rare occasion our parents would make reference to the events that led them to leave Europe to come to America, they would label it “the War.”

They spoke nostalgically of life “before the War”; they never spoke of what happened during “the War.” They spoke reverently of their parents and siblings who were “lost in the War”; they never spoke of their spouses or children who perished. After all, they had new spouses and new children who didn’t need to be reminded that they were replacements.

I was already bar mitzvah when I first realized that my parents had been previously married and had prior children. Years later I was shocked to discover that my sister with whom I was raised was not my father’s daughter.

When I finally came to understand that not every adult was a survivor, and people would ask me what survivors were really like, I never knew what to answer. There was Mr. Silverberg, our seatmate in shul, as jovial as Santa Claus, who always had a good word for everyone. On the other hand, there was Mr. Grauer, our neighbor whose face was indelibly etched in a frown and was always threatening to hit his wife or his children. In retrospect, as a psychiatrist, I could understand both, but who truly defined what it meant to be a survivor? Did anyone, or anything?

I learned the answer from Rabbi Moshe Feinstein.

This gadol hador, the greatest sage of his generation, was so renowned he was referred to simply as “Rav Moshe.” The closest I came to this legend was at Yeshiva University High School, where my rebbe was his son-in-law, Rabbi Moshe Tendler. Rabbi Tendler, and every other rabbi, would speak of Rav Moshe in awe-stricken tones usually reserved for biblical forefathers.

One summer I was spending a week with my aunt and uncle in upstate Ellenville. Uncle David and Aunt Saba, survivors themselves, as the doctor and nurse in charge of the concentration camp infirmary, had managed to save the lives of innumerable inmates, including my mother and sister. After “the War” they had set up a medical practice in this small Catskill village, where, I discovered, to my amazement, they had one celebrity patient - Rav Moshe.

My aunt mentioned casually that Rav Moshe had an appointment the next day. Would I like to meet him? Would I? It was like asking me, would I like to meet God.

I couldn’t sleep that night. I agonized over what I should wear. Should I approach him? What should I say? Should I mention that his son-in-law was my rebbe? Should I speak to him in English, or my rudimentary Yiddish?

I was seated in the waiting room, in the best clothing I had with me, an hour before his appointment. It seemed like an eternity, but eventually he arrived, accompanied by an assistant at each side. He didn’t notice me.

I was frozen. I had intended to rise deferentially when he entered, but I didn’t. I had prepared a few sentences that I had repeatedly memorized, but I sensed that my heart was beating too quickly for me to speak calmly.

My aunt had heard the chime when he entered and came out of the office to greet him: “Rabbi Feinstein, did you meet my nephew Ikey? Can you believe a shaygitz [unobservant] like me has a yeshiva bochur [student] in the family?”

Rav Moshe finally looked at me. I was mortified. My aunt was addressing him irreverently. She was joking with him. She had called me Ikey, not Yitzchok, or even Isaac.

Then it got even worse. She walked over to him. Surely she knew not to shake his hand. She didn’t. She kissed him affectionately on the cheek as she did many of her favorite patients. She then told him my uncle would see him in a minute and returned to the office.

Rav Moshe and his attendants turned and looked at me, I thought accusingly. I wanted to die. In a panic, I walked over to him and started to apologize profusely: “Rabbi Feinstein, I apologize. My aunt, she isn’t frum [religious]. She doesn’t understand…”

He immediately placed his fingers on my lips to stop me from talking. He then softly spoke two sentences in Yiddish that I will remember to my dying day: “She has numbers on her arms. She is holier than me.”

Rav Moshe had understood what I had not. Our holiest generation was defined by the numbers on their arms.

Dr. Isaac Steven Herschkopf is an attending psychiatrist at the NYU Medical Center and the author of “Hello Darkness, My Old Friend: Embracing Anger to Heal Your Life.” This excerpt is from a forthcoming memoir.

The Jewish Week/Matzav.com Newscenter

List of Holocaust Literature

20 Essential Works of Holocaust Literature

January 12th, 2011

Genocide, tragically, has existed as one of humanity's most disgusting, selfish and absolutely wrenching acts ever since its inception. No matter how many scholars research and debate the horrific reality, massive kills by hate-filled, greedy powers will perpetuate the cycle. The Holocaust, initiated by Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party in the early half of the Twentieth Century, left such a bloody, agonizing mark on world history that it spawned its own literary genre. Survivors and witnesses alike took to writing about their experience with the hopes of educating the populace on the terrifying human toll such actions truly take. Later generations of authors continue to use this historical period for myriad reasons — some find themselves inspired by family or friends who bore witness to the events, while others read or hear eyewitness accounts from perfect strangers and feel compelled to explore their narratives. What all of them do, however, is remind the entire world of why it's absolutely necessary to stand up for social justice and protect innocents on the receiving end of harm. Powerful fiction and nonfiction alike imbue readers with the knowledge necessary to identify and actively work towards making the planet safer for all its peoples.

1. Mein Kampf (1925) by Adolf Hitler: At first, it probably (and understandably) seems crass, insane and insensitive to list such a controversial read here. However, many interested in Holocaust literature actually want to pick up the political ramblings of the madman behind the massacre. Though Adolf Hitler's actions are never to be commended or encouraged by any stretch of the imagination, Mein Kampf provides one of the only first-person glimpses at his psychology of unfounded hatred and helps place the atrocities into a broader historical context. Understanding the whats and whys behind intolerance and genocide allows readers to better recognize the signs and work towards hopefully squelching the problem as quickly and efficiently as possible.
2. The Pianist (1945) by Wladyslaw Szpilman: This evocative memoir takes readers to Warsaw before, during and after decimation by the Nazi Party. Musician Wladyslaw Szpilman details almost every harrowing moment of ghetto devastation, the mass exoduses to concentration camps and 1944's violent uprising by the Polish Resistance Home Army. He managed to avoid the ultimate fate of his family, who ended up murdered in Treblinka, and music became both his only solace and a lifesaver. The story of his encounter with a German soldier complicit with his plan to hide in an obscure loft has to be read to be believed.
3. Man's Search for Meaning (1946) by Viktor E. Frankl: Existentialist philosophy played an integral role in the lives of Holocaust perpetrators and victims alike — Friedrich Nietzsche's sister famously co-opted many of his writings to suit Nazi ideologies, for example. Dachau and Theresienstadt survivor Viktor E. Frankl used his horrific experiences to explore broad philosophical questions regarding the myriad interpretations of existence. Man's Search for Meaning starts out dissecting how Holocaust victims internally and externally reacted to their dehumanizing environment, determining what he observed as "normal" behavior patterns. Frankl ultimately discovers that the meaning of his own life is to help guide others towards finding happiness and stability, and he outlines the theory of logotherapy in the process. This is an absolutely essential read for philosophy and psychology fans as well as those looking for great examples of Holocaust literature.
4. Diary of a Young Girl (1947) by Anne Frank: One of the most tragic and memorable works to come out of the Nazi occupation, Anne Frank's diary chronicles two years of life crammed in an Amsterdam attic. The two families hiding from their potential captors — thanks to the cooperation of some sympathetic Dutch — were forced to remain quiet and obscured if they hoped to survive. In spite of the hardship, the young woman's diary frequently reveals an upbeat, positive attitude and ruminations on relatable adolescent experiences, such as crushes and puberty. Her father Otto was responsible for the book's publication following the family's horrific capture and subsequent stint in concentration camps. Anne Frank herself passed away from typhoid while at Bergen-Belsen.
5. If This Is a Man (1947) by Primo Levi: Through vivid poetry and prose, chemist, writer and Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi relates the harrowing eleven months spent within concentration camp walls. His scientific prowess and subsequent illness spared him from some of the tortures heaped upon his fellow captives, though he was not exempt from witnessing abject horror. If This Is a Man also serves as a philosophical inquiry into the mindset of captor and captive alike. He also frequently asks some heavy existential questions, particularly as they relate to the concepts of untermensch and ubermensch.
6. Night (1955) by Elie Wiesel: Auschwitz and Buchenwald survivor Elie Wiesel wrote Night as the first part of a trilogy, followed by the much lesser-known Dawnand Day. Most Holocaust literature classes and reading lists focus mainly on the original work of creative nonfiction, though the other two remain worthwhile reading. This visceral, intense book delves deeply into the horrific realities of life in a concentration camp as well as the atrocities committed even before Wiesel and his family are forced to leave their home. Amidst the horrors towards the end of World War II, his emotional state and faith in God and humanity begin deteriorating, offering up one insightful perspective on how the genocide impacted one of its survivors.
7. The Painted Bird (1965) by Jerzy Kosinski: After his parents flee Nazism, a young boy finds himself wandering ravaged European towns, where he witnesses some brutal and bizarre scenes of sex and violence. Author Jerzy Kosinski stirred up a tempest of controversy by trying to package The Painted Bird as a memoir or work of creative nonfiction. Intensive research eventually revealed the once compelling and disturbing book was a pure product of the writer's imagination, perhaps inspired by a couple of true events, but not stemming directly from any of the ones unearthed by historians and literary critics. Some even contest whether or not Kosinski himself wrote it. However, audiences continue to embrace the troubled publication because of its heavy emotional content — they just read it as fiction rather than something definitive and real — hence its inclusion on this list.
8. Pilgrim Among the Shadows (1967) by Boris Pahor: Literary critics frequently consider Boris Pahor one of the most influential Slovene writers of the Twentieth Century, if not all time. Part memoir, part novel, his Pilgrim Among the Shadowssees him revisiting the concentration camp in the Vosges Mountains that marked one of the most terrifying points in his life. The 1966 voyage back to France offered Pahor a chance to come to terms with the trauma, and he delves into painful detail about the architecture of the building and how the Nazis specifically tailored it to kill and torture its prisoners as efficiently as possible. Ultimately, he feels as if something inherently violent and hateful in humanity spawned the Holocaust and other genocidal injustices. Try as many governments, groups and individuals might, they will never be able to completely stop another one from happening again someday.
9. Jacob the Liar (1969) by Jurek Becker: Plenty of heavy questions regarding morality and hope crop up during the course of the novel, which actually possesses two different endings to further provoke readers. After surviving an encounter with a German officer shortly before curfew, the titular character overhears a radio announcement regarding the encroaching Soviet army. He excitedly hurries the news to the Lodz ghetto in Poland, and fibs about possessing his own radio, a technology legally forbidden to Jews. From there, he must keep up with the masquerade and subsequently imbues his friends and neighbors with a false sense of anticipation and security. This decision ultimately leads to some tragic consequences, no matter which ending one chooses to accept.
10. The Nazi and the Barber (1971) by Edgar Hilsenrath: Himself a Holocaust survivor, this decorated writer has spawned an impressive body of work devoted to fearless portrayals of genocide and marginalization during the Third Reich, in Armenia and elsewhere. The Nazi and the Barber mercilessly (and justifiably) satirizes the people perpetrating serious crimes against humanity through the tale of Max Schulz, an SS member. Following World War II, the mass murderer takes on a Jewish identity and even manages an Israeli immigration. German publishers originally rejected the work on the grounds that it featured a Nazi as the central character, but international readers embraced the grotesquery. The unsympathetic protagonist served as an apt, appropriate mockery that nonviolently dehumanized those who violently, brutally tormented (if not outright killed) Edgar Hilsenrath and his loved ones.
11. Fatelessness (1975) by Imre Kertesz: Nobel Prize winner Imre Kertesz filtered a few elements of his own concentration camp experience into this novel about a Hungarian-Jewish teenager trapped in Auschwitz, then later Buchenwald and a third in Zeitz. Lying about his real age prevents Gyorgy Koves' termination, and he passes a year performing intensive slave labor for the Nazi oppressors. Sadly, the story also highlights prejudices and abuses exacted by the prisoners themselves. While he gradually slips into near-debilitating sickness, the he must also contend with fellow Jews for his inability to speak Hebrew or Yiddish. Though Koves himself isn't entirely innocent — he ironically frowns upon others who "look" their ethnicity. It may only be semi-autobiographical, but Fatelessness certainly packs a provocative punch.
12. Maus (1977) by Art Spiegelman: Maus' central narrative pulls double duty. It's simultaneously the biography of graphic novelist Art Spiegelman's father Vladek, a Holocaust survivor, and an exploration of filial themes and generation gaps. This Pulitzer-winning comic famously uses animals as allegories to respective races, with cats standing in for Germans and Jews represented as mice, among others. Cutting between the past and the present, Spiegelman relates Vladek's bitter memories in his own words, juxtaposing his life, outlook and personality before, during and after the incarceration at Auschwitz. At the same time, the author and artist himself struggles to make sense of an experience he never witnessed, reflecting upon how it may have impacted the often painful relationship with his parents.
13. Sophie's Choice (1979) by William Styron: The term "Sophie's Choice," which posits two equally horrible options, stems directly from the influential National Book Award winner of the same name. Here, the social and political injustices committed in the American South juxtapose with those of the Nazi Party. A Southerner, a Jewish-American and a Polish-Catholic concentration camp survivor find their lives (and loves) slowly intertwining. The eponymous character, saddled with both a schizophrenic, self-medicating boyfriend Nathan and crippling guilt over an absolutely terrifying secret from her past. Though forging a new life in the United States, she succumbs to alcoholism and begins mirroring her lover's propensity for self-destruction, irrevocably traumatized by the emotions and memories she can never escape.
14. At the Mind's Limits (1980) by Jean Amery: As the title so adroitly summarizes, Jean Amery's time spent interred in various concentration camps and fearlessly slinking in the shadows as a freedom fighter afforded him myriad opportunities to contemplate the nuances of the human mind. Mercilessly tortured and witnessing some of humanity's most disgusting, degrading acts of senseless violence, he succumbs to anger, bitterness, a loss of curiosity and faith and helplessness. Even then, though, some kernel of inner strength he never knew he had propelled him to almost miraculously survive Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen and Buchenwald. The intense experiences led Amery to also try and dissect the Third Reich mindset as well. He considered sadism and an id-driven lust for power and torture the most compelling force in the minds of his captors.
15. The Devil's Arithmetic (1988) by Jane Yolen: 12-year-old Hannah Stern absolutely dreads the upcoming Seder. A time-travel mishap launches her to 1942 Poland, where she finds herself amongst a family who thinks her a cholera-stricken orphan. A Nazi raid subsequently lands her in a concentration camp, where the tragedies escalate and ultimately end inside a gas chamber. Jane Yolen's provocative young adult novel revolves around the theme of understanding history and its myriad forms. Throughout Stern's narrative, she explores personal, family, national and international happenstances that mold and shape humanity for good and for ill. Regardless of whether or not an individual notices, someone else's past may very well determine his or her present and future.
16. Number the Stars (1989) by Lois Lowry: Since 1989, many young adults nurtured an interest in history and Holocaust literature thanks to this novel. An apt introduction to the genre, Number the Stars takes readers to Copenhagen, where the Johansen family risks their very lives for the sake of social justice. As the Nazis storm through Denmark in search of Jewish victims, they take in young Annemarie's best friend Ellen Rosen and bravely pretend she is a member of the family. The death of eldest daughter Lise, murdered for her role in the Dutch Resistance Movement, provides them with a relatively easy cover — though life-threatening cracks begin to form in the Johansen's valiant, altruistic plan.
17. Time's Arrow (1991) by Martin Amis: Time's Arrow boasts one of the most adroit uses of backwards chronology, relating the narrative of a Holocaust doctor working as a torturer and killer at Auschwitz starts growing younger and younger. No longer content to putter around in America as an anonymous senior citizen, the new, completely rewound existence grants him an opportunity to heal and restore the victims he so callously dehumanized. They can get back up, go home and continue on a happier, healthier path. Amis fascinatingly (and characteristically) deconstructs familiar Holocaust literature tropes in order to illustrate the illogic and ignorance that characterized the Nazi's decision to carry out the genocide.
18. Everything is Illuminated (2002) by Jonathan Safran Foer: Much like Maus, Jonathan Safran Foer's debut novel merges past and present as a young man explores his family's history. Alternating between his travels and a magic realism story-within-a-story, the protagonist (who shares a name with the author) hopes to track down the woman responsible for smuggling his grandfather out of Trochenbrod as the Nazis rampaged through Ukraine. While journeying through the old schetl, Foer meets up with some friendly and interesting individuals who drive home the overarching themes of love and family.
19. The Book Thief (2005) by Markus Zusak: Death itself narrates intersecting lives, including a girl whose communist parents give her up to save her life, her new foster parents, a Jewish fighter, their neighbor, the mayor's wife and more — though the first comprises the novel's core. Liesel Meminger copes with Germany's volatile political climate by stealing or borrowing books and learning more about the world around her. She forges some incredible friendships with the people in her adopted neighborhood, but Gestapo raids, bombings and run-ins with the Hitler Youth throw it into a tragic, tumultuous state. Yet the young woman's reading and interpersonal connections inspire her to press on and survive in the face of total devastation.
20. The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (2006) by John Boyne: This absolutely heart-and-gut-wrenching tale looks at the Holocaust from the perspective of a young German boy entirely oblivious to the travesties his own people are inflicting upon others. He befriends another child, Shmuel, who lives behind an inescapable fence and wears a mysterious pair of the eponymous garment — which has been, of course, forced upon him by the Auschwitz guards. The two eventually develop an indomitable friendship that leads them both to tragic consequences. Like most historical fiction, the author does take some liberties with reality. However, the unusual perspective makes the popular, acclaimed novel a curious addition to any Holocaust literature reading list.

Deadly Secret

When The Very Last Survivor Fades Away

What is your opinion? How would you preserve the memory of the atrocities our nation went through? Do you think it is important? Why?

Photo by: Associated Press Only 2 survivors remain from Nazi camp Treblinka


By ASSOCIATED PRESS

11/01/2010 11:08





Samuel Willenberg, Kalman Taigman are devoting their final years to trying to preserve the memory of 875,000 people systematically murdered.

Talkbacks (1)

BAT YAM, Israel — They are believed to be the last two survivors of the most chillingly efficient killing machine of the Nazi Holocaust: the Treblinka extermination camp in occupied Poland.



Samuel Willenberg and Kalman Taigman, 87-year-old Israelis, are devoting their final years to trying to preserve the memory of the 875,000 people systematically murdered in a one-year killing spree at the height of World War II. Almost all of them were Jews.



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Only 67 people are known to have survived the camp, fleeing in a brazen revolt shortly before Treblinka was destroyed. Following the recent death of a prominent chronicler, Israel's national Holocaust memorial said the two Israeli men are now the final living link to one of the most notorious death camps in human history.



"The world cannot forget Treblinka," said Willenberg.



"Soon there will be no one left to tell," added Taigman.



Treblinka holds a notorious place in history as perhaps the most vivid example of the "Final Solution," the Nazi plot to rid Europe of Jews.



Along with the lesser known Belzec and Sobibor camps, it was designed with the sole intention of exterminating Jews, and Treblinka was by far the deadliest. Victims, transported there in cattle cars, were gassed to death almost immediately upon arrival.



Only a select few — mostly young, strong men like Willenberg and Taigman, who were both 20 at the time— were spared an immediate trip to the gas chambers and assigned to maintenance work instead.



On August 2, 1943, a group of Jews stole some weapons, set fire to the camp and headed to the woods. Hundreds fled, but most were shot and killed by Nazi troops in the surrounding mine fields or captured by Polish villagers who returned them to Treblinka.



The survivors became the only source of knowledge about Treblinka, because the Nazis all but destroyed it in a frantic bid to cover their tracks.



Willenberg said he was shot in the leg as he climbed over bodies piled at the barbed wire fence and catapulted over. He kept running, ignoring dead friends in his path. He said his blue eyes and "non-Jewish" look allowed him to survive in the countryside before arriving in Warsaw and joining the Polish underground.



Later in life, he took to sculpturing to describe his experiences. His bronze statues reflect what he saw — Jews standing on a train platform, a father removing his son's shoes before entering the gas chambers, a young girl having her head shaved, prisoners removing bodies.



"I live two lives, one is here and now and the other is what happened there," Willenberg said in an interview at his Tel Aviv apartment. "It never leaves me. It stays in my head. It goes with me always."



His two sisters were murdered there. He described his survival as "chance, sheer chance," choking back tears. "It wasn't because of God. He wasn't there. He was on vacation."



In all, the Nazis and their collaborators killed about 6 million Jews during the Holocaust. The death toll at Treblinka was second only to Auschwitz — a prison camp where more than a million people died in gas chambers or from starvation, disease and forced labor.



Taigman said he recalls the uprising vividly, and that resisting the Germans was a "dream" for the prisoners.



He entered Treblinka holding the hand of his mother, who was quickly pulled away from him and murdered. He left watching a Nazi flag burning in the distance from a blaze they had set — a small piece of revenge after nearly a year of torment.



"It was hell, absolutely hell," said Taigman, who lives in a retirement home south of Tel Aviv. "A normal man cannot imagine how a living person could have lived through it — killers, natural-born killers, who without a trace of remorse just murdered every little thing."



Taigman, who wandered in the Polish countryside for nearly a year after his escape, said his most lasting memory of Treblinka is fellow prisoners who had to remove bodies — often their own relatives — from gas chambers.



After the war, Willenberg and Taigman made their ways to Israel, where they pursued careers and raised families. Willenberg became a surveyor in Israel's Housing Ministry, while Taigman was an importer. The survivors have maintained their special connection, meeting each other often over the years.



David Silberklang, a senior historian at Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial, said that in contrast to other camps where Jews were also used for industrial labor, Treblinka truly represented the essence of the Nazi Final Solution.



"Treblinka had nothing, just killing, and they almost finished the job. These camps left us almost nothing," he said. Without the survivors, he said "it would just be a black hole, we would know nothing. With them, we know quite a lot," he said.



One of the men most responsible for documenting the atrocities was Eliahu Rosenberg, who was tasked with removing bodies from gas chambers and dumping them into giant pits. He passed away in September, but before his death recounted his experiences in a video testimony to Yad Vashem.



"It poisoned, choked people within 25 minutes, all would suffocate. It was terrible to hear the screaming of the women and the children. They cried: "Mama!" ''Tata! (Dad)" but in a few minutes they choked to death," he said.



"The crematoriums were train rails which lay on a concrete base. On them were wood planks, we called it 'grills.' We threw the body parts onto those 'grills,' and with a match everything burnt. And we stood there ... and it burned all night, all night long."







After the revolt, the Nazis attempted to destroy all evidence of their atrocities. The camp structures were destroyed, the ground plowed and planted over. Today, all the remains at the site are a series of concrete slabs representing the train tracks, and mounds of gravel with a memorial of stone tablets representing lost communities.



The two remaining survivors have returned to lead tours of the site. Taigman made the trip just one time, saying it was too painful to go back again, while Willenberg has gone on several occasions, most recently last week.



"There are only two of us left. After we go, there will be nothing," said Willenberg. "All I will leave behind are my sculptures and most importantly, my daughter and my grandchildren."

A Story Untold

The remarkable story of a group of Holocaust survivors who hid in one of the world's largest caves
Peter Lane Taylor


The night of October 12, 1942, when the Stermers finally ran for good, was moonless and unseasonably cold. The roads in and out of the town of Korolowka, deep in the farm country of western Ukraine, were empty of the cart traffic that had peaked during the fall harvest days. After a month of backbreaking work, most residents had already drifted off to sleep.

Zaida Stermer, his wife, Esther, and their six children dug up their last remaining possessions from behind their house, loaded their wagons with food and fuel, and, just before midnight, quietly fled into the darkness. Traveling with them were nearly two dozen neighbors and relatives, all fellow Jews who, like the Stermers, had so far survived a year under the German occupation of their homeland. Their destination, a large cave about five miles to the north, was their last hope of finding refuge from the Nazis’ intensifying roundups and mass executions of Ukrainian Jews.

The dirt track they rode on ended by a shallow sinkhole, where the Stermers and their neighbors unloaded their carts, descended the slope, and squeezed through the cave’s narrow entrance. In their first hours underground, the darkness around them must have seemed limitless. Navigating with only candles and lanterns, they would have had little depth perception and been able to see no more than a few feet. They made their way to a natural alcove not far from the entrance and huddled in the darkness. As the Stermers and the other families settled in for that first night beneath the cold, damp earth, there was little in their past to suggest that they were prepared for the ordeal ahead.

* * *

At the surface, Priest’s Grotto is little more than a weedy hole in the ground amid the endless wheat fields stretching across western Ukraine. A short distance away, a low stand of hardwoods withers in the heat and is the only sign of cover for miles around. With the exception of a shallow, 90-foot-wide depression in the flat ground, there’s nothing to indicate that one of the longest horizontal labyrinths in the world lies just underfoot.

On the afternoon of July 18, 2003, I am standing with Chris Nicola, a leading American caver, at the bottom of the sinkhole, sorting our gear. It has taken us four days, traveling by jet, train, and finally ox cart, to get here from New York City. Our guides, 46-year-old Sergey Yepephanov and 24-year-old Sasha Zimels, are standing next to the rusting three-foot-wide metal entrance pipe that leads underground.

I’ve come here to explore Priest’s Grotto for the first time. For Nicola, a 20-year veteran of major cave systems in the U.S. and Mexico, our expedition is the culmination of a journey that began in 1993, soon after the fall of the Soviet Union, when he became one of the first Americans to explore Ukraine’s famous Gypsum Giant cave systems. His last excursion was here, to the cave known locally as Popowa Yama, or Priest’s Grotto, because of its location on land once owned by a parish priest.

Thanks to him, we survived.”

Shulim Stermer leaned forward across the dining room table as he spoke, his eyes side through heavy prescription glasses. His brother Shlomo, their sister Yetta Katz, and his niece Pepkale Blitzer sat respectfully on either side of him, surrounded by Shulim and Shlomo’s wives and several children and grandchildren. At 84, Shulim is the oldest living survivor from Priest’s Grotto.

After Chris Nicola met that first Priest’s Grotto survivor, Solomon Wexler, in the Bronx, Wexler had introduced him to his Canadian cousins and fellow survivors, the Stermers. Throughout 2003, Chris and I made five trips to Montreal to interview the Stermer family. Over the course of several long conversations we learned that the facts of their story were even more extraordinary than the rumors. The Stermers and several other families had escaped the Holocaust by living in two separate caves for close to two years. The first was a tourist cave known as Verteba. Only later did their group -- which eventually swelled to 38 people -- discover and inhabit the then unexplored Priest’s Grotto, where they lived for 344 days. Though some of the survivors lost touch with each other in the years after the war, the Stermers, their in-laws the Dodyks, and Sol Wexler remained close. In all, we were able to make contact with six living survivors: the two Stermer brothers (Shulim, 84, and Shlomo, 74); their sister, Yetta, 78; their cousin, Sol Wexler, 74; and their nieces Shunkale, 70, and Pepkale, 65.

Shulim Stermer’s ninth-floor apartment was spacious and airy, with high ceilings and eight-foot plate glass windows running the length of the western wall. Hung on one wall was a large, striking photography of the six Stermer children with their parents, Es

At 77 miles, Priest’s Grotto ranks as the tenth longest cave in the world.

At 77 miles, Priest’s Grotto is the second longest of the Gypsum Giants and currently ranks as the tenth longest cave in the world. Yet what Nicola found fascinating about the cave was located just minutes inside the entrance: Soon after they’d set out, his group passed two partially intact stone walls and other signs of habitation including several old shoes, buttons, and a hand-chiseled millstone. Nicola’s guides from the local caving association told him the campsite had already been there when their group first explored that portion of the cave in the early 1960’s.

“My guides called the site Khatki, or ‘cottage,’” Nicola, now 53, recalls. “They told me that it was settled by a group of local Jews who had fled to the cave during the Holocaust. But that’s where the story ended. No one else could remember what had actually happened there or even if the Jews had survived the war at all.”

Intrigued, Nicola began asking questions in the nearby towns. Western Ukraine is a region where the Gypsum Giants have long been revered as national landmarks and where uncomfortable memories of the Holocaust still linger. Some local villagers told him that, after the Russian troops pushed back the Germans in 1944, the survivors were seen stumbling back to town, covered in thick, yellow mud. Others said the Jews never saw daylight again.

On a later trip, Nicola learned more. “Rumors kept developing that at least three families did survive,” he says. But how had they lived in such an inhospitable environment, Nicola wondered, and where were they today? As a caver, he was awed by the courage and resourcefulness that such long-term survival underground must have demanded. And he was amazed that the story wasn’t better known, even among Holocaust experts.

Back home in Queens, New York, Nicola intensified his efforts to locate a Priest’s Grotto survivor. He added information about the story to his Web site on Ukrainian caves (www.uaycef.org), hoping that anyone searching the Internet for the topic would contact him. For four years he got no response. Then, one evening in December 2002, Nicola received an email from a man who said that his father-in-law was one of the original Priest’s Grotto survivors and was, in fact, living just a few miles away in the Bronx. “I couldn’t believe what I was seeing,” Nicola says, “I was afraid to even touch the print key in case I were to accidentally erase it.”

Seven months later we are standing outside the cave itself. Our two dozen duffels contain over 200 pounds of photographic and survey gear and enough supplies to remain underground for three days.

* * *

“My mother always said, ‘We are not going to the slaughterhouse.’ She said to my brother, Nissel, ‘Go to the forest, find a hole, anything.’ Thanks to him, we survived.”

"‘Go to the forest, find a hole, anything.’ther and Zaida, taken a few years before World War II. On the dining room table lay one of their most precious family treasures: a memoir of their survival, originally written in Yiddish by their mother, Esther, and then privately published in English in 1975.

“My mother never trusted authority,” Shulim told us. “The Germans, the Russians, the Ukrainians. It didn’t matter. She taught us early on that no matter who it was, if they told you to do one thing, you always did the opposite. If the Germans said, ‘Go to the ghettos, you’ll be safe there,’ you went to the forest or the mountains. You went as far away from the ghettos as you could go.”

In the early 1930’s, Esther Stermer was the proud matriarch of one of the most well-regarded families in Korolowka. Her husband was a successful merchant. It was a rare time of opportunity for many Jews in Western Ukraine; Jewish cultural life and Zionist and socialist movements were thriving.

But with the rise of Nazi power in Germany, and increasing anti-Semitic violence at home, all that soon came to an end. In 1939 the Germans seized Czechoslovakia and then invaded Poland. Threatened by Hitler’s eastward advance, the Russians countered by invading western -- or Polish -- Ukraine. For a short time, a cynical non-aggression pact between the Germans and the Russians kept the region quiet even as the rest of Europe erupted in war. That shaky peace collapsed in June 1941, when Hitler’s armies stormed the border from Poland and rolled across Ukraine’s open plains toward Stalingrad and the oil fields of the Caspian Sea. Almost immediately, German Einsatzgruppen paramilitary units began roaming the country, executing Jews and others at will.

The Stermers’ town of Korolowka was officially declared judenfrei -- “free of Jews” -- in the summer of 1942, and the Germans stepped up their efforts to eliminate the Jewish population. During the holiday of Sukkot, the Gestapo encircled the town, forced the Jews to dig mass graves, and executed them dozens at a time. Though the Stermers and a few other families managed to escape, their fate seemed inevitable. No Jew would get out alive.

“Death stalked each step,” Esther wrote of that autumn. “But we were not surrendering to this fate.... Our family in particular would not let the Germans have their way easily. We had vigor, ingenuity, and determination to survive.... But where can we survive? Clearly, there was no place on Earth for us.”

The true record for surviving underground was set by the women and children of Priest’s Grotto, who never ventured out of the cave during their entire 344-day ordeal.

The longest period of time a human is recorded to have survived underground is 205 days. The record was set in Texas’ Midnight Cave in 1972 by Frenchman Michel Siffre, as part of a NASA-sponsored experiment studying the effects of long-duration space-flight. Yet, in listening to the survivors, Chris Nicola and I had realized that the true record was set by the women and children of Priest’s Grotto, who never ventured out of the cave during their entire 344-day ordeal. Modern cavers require special clothing to ward off hypothermia, advanced technology for lighting and travel, and intensive instruction in ropes and navigation to survive underground for just a few days. How did 38 untrained, ill-equipped people survive for so long in such a hostile environment during history’s darkest era? That was the question our expedition had come some 7,000 miles to answer.

* * *

The Stermers’ first underground home, the tourist cave of Verteba, was a temporary refuge at best. At worst, it was a death trap. The cave had poor ventilation and no dependable water source. And the families would almost certainly be discovered when the snows melted in April and the local peasants (many of whom had welcomed the invading Germans) returned to their fields near the mouth of the cave.

“Our situation at that time was really, really bad,” recalled Shlomo Stermer, the younger brother. “We didn’t have any water, and we had to catch the drips that came off the walls in cups. We also couldn’t cook inside without choking on the smoke. We had no idea how we were going to survive.”

Much of the heavy labor fell to the Stermer men: the father, Shabsy – whom everyone called Zaida, or Grandpa – and his three sons, Nissel, age 25, Shulim, 22, and Shlomo, 13. Esther Stermer and her adult daughters Chana and Henia took charge of domestic chores with the help of Yetta, 17, the family’s youngest girl.

Before fleeing with their families to the cave, Zaida, Nissel, and Henia’s husband, Fishel Dodky, had received special permission to collect scrap metal under official protection from the local police. It was perilous, humiliating labor. But their ability to return to their houses, move freely in public, and buy supplies on the black market represented their families’ only lifeline. Week after week, they drove their wagons to the cave under cover of darkness through the deep snow. At the edge of the sinkhole, they descended the icy slopes carrying hundred-pound sacks of flour, potatoes, kerosene, and water on their backs, and then dragged them through the mud inside the cave. Through the winter of 1942-43, the families’ survival hung in a precarious balance between the secrecy of their location and the security of their supply lines. The men warned their families that the Germans were intensifying their hunt for Jews, and in February 1943 the group decided to move even deeper into the cave. They sealed themselves in a low, sickle-shaped room more than a thousand feet from daylight and began to search for a second, secret exit in case the Gestapo attempted to blockade them inside. The Stermer brothers discovered a small fracture in the ceiling of a nearby passage and feverishly began digging with picks and axes. Day after day, the men tunneled upward, finally breaking through to the surface after four weeks. It was the first time many of them had seen the sky in months.

Before returning underground, Shulim concealed their exit with earth and logs and suspended a long chain down to the cave’s floor below. If the Nazis discovered their refuge, his family could escape by climbing up the chain using small kick steps in the walls for support. After roughly 150 days of living in perpetual terror of being discovered, the Stermers and their neighbors finally began to feel they might have a chance of surviving.

* * *

Four weeks later, the Jews’ optimism was shattered by the sound of bootsteps and rattling guns. “The Germans are here!” someone suddenly yelled in Yiddish. “They’ve discovered us!”

“The Germans are here!” someone suddenly yelled in Yiddish. “They’ve discovered us!”

Young Shlomo was sleeping closest to the entrance of the chamber and was caught helpless before he had the chance to run. In the glare of the Gestapo’s flashlights he could see that others had been captured, too. At the entrance to their refuge, Shlomo’s mother, Esther, was standing toe-to-toe with the Gestapo’s commanding officer. Shlomo could hear her speaking in German.

“Very well, so you have found us. What do you think?” Esther said. “Do you think that unless you kill us the Fuhrer will lose the war? Look at how we live here, like rats. All we want is to live, to survive the war years. Leave us here.”

Sixty years later, Shlomo rose out of his chair to imitate his mother as he quoted her. “I couldn’t believe what I was hearing!” he continued. “Here was my mother, in the middle of the war, standing up to the Germans!”

As Esther confronted the soldiers, stalling for time, the rest of her children and the other survivors slipped away into the dark maze of passageways branching off from the campsite. In the end, the Germans managed to seize just eight of the Jews and began to march them back to the cave’s entrance at gunpoint. Miraculously, six of the prisoners, including Esther, were able to escape and eventually return to their families. But Sol Wexler would soon learn that his mother and nine-year-old brother had been forced into an open grave and shot.

For those who remained inside the cave, the next three hours were spent in a state of terror and confusion. Few of the survivors had kept track of how far they had fled in the dark, and many ended up out of earshot of one another, lost without matches, candles, water, or any idea of how to find their way back to camp.

For the middle son, Shulim, in particular, the shock of being discovered was cataclysmic. When Esther finally found her way back to the encampment, she was horrified to see her middle son lying paralyzed at the bottom of the exit shaft he had dug just weeks earlier.

“I saw that all had climbed through the exit except Shulim, who was sitting on the ground trembling, head thrown back,” she wrote. “I ran to him, spoke to him, but he did not reply. His eyes were glazed, his teeth clenched and he was drooling at the mouth.”

Back in Montreal, Shulim grew quiet when we raised the topic of his breakdown.

“I had a complete shock. It was a miracle that I even survived.”

“I was almost destroyed in the first cave,” he finally offered. “I had a complete shock. I couldn’t talk, I couldn’t walk, I couldn’t take a spoon and pick it up to my mouth. It was a miracle that I even survived.”

It was the worst possible time for Shulim to break down. No one else knew how to open the trap door at the top of the exit shaft. Shulim’s sister, Chana, and Sol Wexler were the first to reach the top, but they were unable to move the logs that locked the door in place. As the other survivors began to bottleneck near the surface, panic set in.

Finally, with one last effort, Sol and Chana succeeded in breaking through to the surface, and everyone rushed from the exit. Outside, the air was cold and wet, and many of the survivors began to shiver uncontrollably. To the north, they could see the Gestapo and their dogs running search grids around the sinkhole looking for a secret exit. Shulim was the last to leave, carried up the shaft on his brothers’ shoulders. Then the survivors slipped away through the grass and fled into the darkness.

* * *

Throughout the month of April 1943, the Jews lived like outlaws in their own community. The Stermers moved along the back roads at night between the boarded-up remains of their house in Korolowka and a hidden bunker in a barn.

Desperate to find a permanent refuge, the Stermers’ eldest son, Nissel, sought the counsel of his friend, Munko Lubudzin, a forester who lived in the woods near Korolowka. Though many Ukrainian Christians willingly participated in the Holocaust -- and the Ukrainian police actively collaborated with the Nazis -- Munko Lubudzin faithfully assisted the Stermers throughout the war. Munko told Nissel about a sinkhole a few miles outside of town, located in the fields of a local parish priest. At the surface, there was nothing remarkable about the place. Unlike at Verteba, there was little indication that the sinkhole might contain an entrance to a sizable cave. It was only a hole in the ground where farmers their dead livestock to rot.

Nissel knew there were several caves in the area that had a history of ancient human habitation. Based on this slim hope, Nissel and brother Shulim left Korolowka at first light on May 1, 1943, along with their friend, Karl Kurz, and two of the Dodyk brothers. The men raced through the fields north of town to the edge of the sinkhole. “When we came there, there was some nice, nice grass, like a golf course.” Shulim remembered, his voice rising excitedly. “And then you have a big ravine about 40 feet deep and water used to drip in.”

The men descended the loose dirt at the top using an open old rope, then clambered down the last 20 feet using logs as a makeshift ladder. At the bottom, the mud came up to their knees, and the stench of the rotting livestock made the men gag, but they could see a small opening, about the size of a fireplace. Nissel was the first to squeeze through. Inside, it was completely black, but by the dim light of their candles the men could see that they were in a small room surrounded by large boulders. “After that,” Shulim said, “the cave just kept on going.”

“The cave just kept on going.”

Seventy-five feet farther on, the men crawled into a chamber so large that their candles could scarcely light the walls or the ceiling overhead. After their six months in Verteba, they were now experienced cave explorers. They pulled out a coil of rope, tied one end to a bounder, and began searching the network of passages for a suitable place for camp. Three hours later, disoriented and fatigued, Shulim dragged his foot over a small ledge, dislodging a stone, which rolled downhill and splashed into a clear underground lake. The men laughed for the first time in months: They had found a water source.

“By the time we went into the second cave, I think there was truly no place else that we could go,” Pepkale said. “It was judenfrei. Any Jew who was seen anywhere could have been shot by anybody. It was just a godsend that they found this place.”

Four days later, on May 5, the Stermers, their in-laws the Dodyks, and various other relatives and friends packed up their last supplies and fled to Priest’s Grotto. The group now numbered 38 in all. The oldest was a 75-year-old grandmother; the youngest included Esther’s four-year-old granddaughter Pepkale and a toddler. They descended the sinkhole one by one in silence, climbing hand over hand down the rocky faces and stepping on the slippery wet logs for support. At the bottom, the complete darkness inside the narrow entrance was terrifying, and the youngest children started to cry as they crawled through the opening. It would be the last time many of them would see the sky for nearly a year.

* * *

For their new home, the survivors chose a series of four interconnected rooms far to the left of the cave’s main passageways. Compared with the world they had left above them, the initial security of their new refuge must have seemed like heaven. For the smallest children, Priest’s Grotto was the first taste of real freedom they had ever experienced. “We would sing and play in the grotto,” Pepkale recalled back in Montreal. “It was the only I had ever felt safe.”

“Long ago,” Esther wrote of their refuge, “people believed that spirits and ghosts lived in ruins and in caves. Now we could see that there were none here. The devils and the evil spirits were on the outside, not in the grotto.”

It wasn’t long, however, before the Jews’ initial relief was overshadowed by the question of how they were going to survive. Drawing on the lessons of Verteba, the families found a ventilated chamber for their cooking fire, isolated their water sources, and constructed beds of wooden planks. Reestablishing their supply lines was their next urgent priority. The men had lost their scrap-metal exemption, and there was only enough kerosene, flour, and other supplies to last two weeks.

The three Stermer brothers made their first foray out of the cave accompanied by several other men. At the top of the sinkhole they sprinted through the high grass to the edge of the woods a thousand feet away, where they crouched down and waited. Overhead, a thin crescent moon lay hidden behind a dark skin of low clouds, and the wind blew across the plains with a persistent moan. From behind the trees, Nissel scanned the horizon to see if anyone had seen them come out of the sinkhole. But the landscape was quiet, a few smoldering buildings the only signs of life.

On Nissel’s cue, the men scattered into the woods and began to dismember 20 large trees, working frantically with axes and saws in almost total darkness. Half the men chopped off the branches and cut the trunks into five-foot lengths, while the others carried the logs back to the cave across the open fields.

“This was terrible danger,” Shulim exclaimed. “You hear ...you listen. And you hear the cutting with the ax: ‘Pow! Boom! Bam!’ So much noise!” As he spoke, Shulim cut his hands through the air, a sense of defiance still lingering in his voice.

Their second covert mission took place a few days later. The men left the cave as a group and then split up at the edge of the sinkhole to secure food and other vital reserves for their own individual families. Nissel and Shulim sprinted west through the fields, staying near the trees for cover. It was a three-mile round-trip journey from Priest’s Grotto to their friend Munko Lubudzin’s house, where the brothers traded a few remaining valuables for cooking oil, detergent, matches and flour.

“When we got out, there was the Big Dipper,” Shulim told us when we asked how they kept time without watches. “The Big Dipper was like that” -- in the empty space in front of him, he circumscribed a wide arc with his arms across the table. “It was turning, turning, and when it was almost horizontal we knew it would soon be morning. We knew we had to get back.”

The next day, the men slept for 20 uninterrupted hours.

When Nissel, Shulim, and the other men finally returned to the cave, they whispered a password to one of the younger boys, posted just inside of the entrance, who quickly dislodged a large boulder to let them back in.

The next day, the men slept for 20 uninterrupted hours, while Esther and her daughters piled the Stermers’ rations neatly upon shelves they’d built under their wooden bunks. In all, the men had secured enough supplies for another six weeks.

As Shulim finished his story, Yetta turned to face him. She had been watching her older brother intently while he spoke. “We wouldn’t be alive today if it weren’t for them!” she finally burst out through a surge of tears. “Every time we needed something, they brought the flour and potatoes so I could make the soup.”

Shulim smiled at his sister.

“Yetta made the best soup in the world,” he said softly.

* * *

As summer 1943 arrived, World War II raged across Europe more fiercely than ever. Poland’s remaining ghettos were liquidated and Jewish resistance crushed. All the while, the Stermers and their neighbors lived in a state of near-hibernation under the fields of Ukraine. The combination of the cave’s naturally high humidity and the moisture from their own respiration kept their tattered clothes constantly damp; even the slightest breeze could induce hypothermia. They slept for up to 22 hours at a time, lying side by side on their plank beds and rising only to eat, relieve themselves, or attend to other rudiments of staying alive.

The combination of stress and sensory deprivation the Jews endured was almost without parallel.

Survival expert Kenneth Kamler, M.D., author of Surviving the Extremes, believes the combination of stress and sensory deprivation the Jews endured was almost without parallel. “Their experience was analogous to long-duration spaceflight. They had no day-night rhythm, and because of the lack of light, slept for extensive periods, but they could never relax.”

During their waking hours, the Stermers worked on improving their home, digging stairs and trenches to make walking easier. They limited their use of candles and lanterns to two or three brief periods each day, often working in complete darkness. The family obeyed a chain of command that began with Esther and extended down through her eldest sons with military precision. In explorer Ernest Shackleton’s account of his ship’s long imprisonment in the Antarctic sea ice, he stressed the importance of maintaining shipboard routines and adhering to a strict code of responsibilities. Esther’s memoir reveals a similar attitude toward discipline. “Inside our cave, each one of us did his assigned duties,” she writes. “We cooked, we washed, we made needed repairs. Cleanliness was of the utmost importance. Life in our grotto went on with its own normality.”

In early July, however, the survivors’ rising confidence was shattered by the sound of one of the Dodyk men screaming.

“The entrance to the cave is blocked!” he shouted, scrambling into Khatki. “We will die here of starvation!”

The other men jumped from their beds and crawled quickly to the entrance, discovering a wall of earth and boulders trapping them inside. From underground, it was impossible to know if some of the men had been spotted in the woods, or if a Gestapo patrol had followed their tracks to the entrance. Instead of storming the entrance, whoever it was had simply sealed them in.

The men found a narrow gap between two rocks a few feet from the blocked entrance and frantically started to dig for daylight. For the next three nights they tunneled upward, chiseling away at the stones at the loose fracture gradually turned toward the ceiling. On the fourth day, Nissel pried a large rock from the top of the shaft and felt the wind rush in from outside, carrying with it the warm, tangy aroma of a passing thunderstorm.

A group of Ukrainian villagers had blocked the entrance to the cave.

The survivors later learned that a group of Ukrainian villagers had worked with picks and shovels until they filled the ravine and blocked the entrance to the cave. “Some of the Ukrainians helped us to survive,” Shulim said simply. “But some of them were very bad.”

With their refuge no longer a secret, the Jews stood steady guard with sickles and axes at the bottom of the entrance shaft and listened constantly for the sound of strange voices. It was impossible to know whether the Nazis or local police were planning to ambush the cave or if they had given its inhabitants up for dead.

Nissel and Shulim ventured even deeper into the cave’s labyrinths, looking desperately for a breach where they could begin digging for a secret exit. By this time the two oldest brothers were finely attuned to the state of sensory deprivation underground. They could walk for hours without tracing their steps, recognizing each passageway merely by feel. It took two weeks to find a suitable spot, and more weeks to tunnel through layers of rock, gravel, and clay. As they reached the 50-foot mark, however, the shaft started to collapse, showering the men with rock and debris. After two serious cave-ins, they gave up for good.

Though exhausted from their failed effort, the Jews could no longer put off restocking their supplies for another long winter. The plains of Ukraine yield an unimaginable bounty every September and October. Yet the risk of being caught above ground had never been greater. The lack of food over the summer had made the men weak, and during harvest the nearby fields were crowded with farmers and prowled by Nazi patrols.

“In the fall the farmers harvested potatoes and made big pile,” Shulim said. “Twelve of us went out with sacks and carried potatoes all night long. We would come up to a pile and say, ‘Good evening. Is anyone there?’ And if no one answered, we would get to work.” The men collected enough potatoes to last through the winter and hauled them to Priest’s Grotto, where the younger boys and women were waiting to drag them back to Khatki.

* * *

On November 10, 1943, the older Stermer men went to their friend, Semen Sawkie, who, like Munko Lubudzin, faithfully sold them food and fuel throughout the war. Sawkie sold them 250 pounds of desperately needed grain and helped them transport it to the woods near Priest’s Grotto in his wagon. Nissel then ventured to the cave entrance, where his youngest brother, Shlomo, was waiting to make sure all was clear. Soon the men were lugging the heavy sacks to the cave.

Unknown to them, the Ukrainian police had watched them approach and were preparing for an ambush. When Nissel and Shulim reached the edge of the sinkhole, they slipped down the entrance shaft and, with Shlomo’s help, began pulling the sacks into the cave from below. “But one of the sacks got stuck,” Shulim said suddenly, shoving his shoulder against an imaginary obstacle in front of him. “And the entrance was blocked. No one could get in our out.”

Then the men heard footsteps above them. “We’re all here,” the men in the cave said to themselves. “So who’s outside?”

There was a barrage of bullets ricocheting into the cave’s narrow opening.

The next thing Shulim and Shlomo remember hearing was a barrage of bullets ricocheting into the cave’s narrow opening. The men took cover behind the boulders that had been used to blockade the entrance. Other than barring entry to the bottom of the shaft, the men were helpless against a full-scale assault.

But after the initial round of gunfire, the survivors never heard another shot. Local peasants who gathered around the grotto after the attack told the Ukrainian police that the Jews were armed and had secret exits all over the place, information that they believed to be true. Scared of what might await them at the bottom of the sinkhole, the officers didn’t attempt to enter but instead swept the fields looking for another way in. They found nothing.

“If that sack didn’t get stuck, we wouldn’t be here,” Shullim finally said. “It was one of many miracles.”

* * *

As the first snows began to fall across western Ukraine, the sinkhole drifted over, leaving no trace of the entrance. Underground, with enough food and fuel for more than two months, the men moved a massive boulder in front of the entry shaft and barricaded it with logs.

After seven months underground, the Jews’ fight for survival was becoming a war of attrition. Their meager diet of grain and soup lacked protein, calcium, and crucial vitamins, leaving them vulnerable to jaundice and scurvy. “I remember that I was always hungry,” the Stermers’ granddaughter, Pepkale, said. “I knew I mustn’t ask for more, but I used to say to my mother, ‘Couldn’t I have just a little bit more bread?’ But that was the ration for the day.” Many of the survivors would eventually dwindle to two-thirds their normal weight.

Yet, surrounded by family, the Stermers were able to draw on more than just physical courage and endurance to keep themselves alive. “We knew that our family would always be loyal to one another,” Pepkale said. “Even when things were at their words, you could always look around and see your sister, your mother, and the rest of your family. It helped us to remember what we were fighting for.”

Survival expert Kamler suggests that Pepkale’s view is more than sentiment. “The one thing that’s common to every survival story is the belief in something greater than yourself,” he says. “For the Jews hiding in the cave, it was their need to save their families. There’s no doubt that family was the number one factor in their survival.”

* * *

With only a few hours remaining until our planned rendezvous with our surface support team, Sergey appears in the entry room. During a two-hour soul, he’s rediscovered a chamber a half mile from Khatki that has graffiti written on the walls. Chris, Sasha, and I reach the room a few minutes later and find Sergey kneeling under a large crack between two sheets of bedrock. He rolls his face skyward, sending a curtain of soft orange light across the ceiling, where there are at least ten different inscriptions scrawled into the stone.

The first words Chris and I see are written in Ukrainian, some as recently as 2000. The others are the names of various local cavers who first explored this region of the cave some 40 years ago. When Chris first saw this chamber on one of his early trips, led by legendary Ukrainian caver Valery Rogozhnikov, these names were just graffiti. Now he sees something different. “My God,” I hear him whisper.

Directly above him, written in charcoal on the ceiling, are the words: “Stermer,” “Dodyk,” “K. Kurz,” “Salomon,” and “Wekselblad” – a name we knew was later anglicized to “Wexler.” Two feet farther down on the ceiling is the date “1943.”

The unique thing about caves, as compared with other environments, is the way history survives underground, almost as if in a vacuum. Above ground, buildings decay, memories fade, the past is gradually lost. But over our heads the five names look as bold as the day they’d been written: only a faint encrustation of tiny gypsum crystals – which grow continually on the cave walls – betrays the intervening six decades. Chris gazes at the names for a long while. After ten years of searching for the survivors, months of interviews, and three days of reconstructing the smallest details of their lives here in the cave, his mission is nearly complete.

* * *

As the winter of 1944 turned to spring, their friend, Munko, told the Stermer men that he could see bright, orange explosions over the eastern hills at night. Though it would be another year until the final collapse of Hitler’s Third Reich, the Russian front was quickly advancing west.

The message in the bottle read simply: “The Germans are already gone.”

The survivors greeted the news of their potential liberation with a mixture of elation and dread. Overhead, the front passed back and forth over the entrance to the sinkhole in a volley of artillery and small-arms fire, but beneath dozens of feet of solid bedrock, the Jews had no way of knowing when it was safe to come out. One morning in early April, Shlomo approached the bottom of the entrance shaft and saw a small bottle in the mud. The message in the bottle, dropped by a peasant friend, read simply: “The Germans are already gone.”

For ten more days the Stermer and their neighbors waited for the chaos to subside; then, on April 12, 1944, they stashed their tools and supplies deep inside the cave and squeezed one by one through Priest’s Grotto’s narrow entrance. Heavy snow had fallen over the previous week, and ice-cold water flowed into the shaft from above, covering them with mud. Outside the entrance, the Jews scaled the steep banks of the sinkhole and rose to stand in the blinding sunshine for the first time in 344 days.

At first, they stood motionless, barely able to recognize one another in the brilliant light reflecting off the snow. Their faces were jaundiced and drawn, their clothes were tattered, and they were caked with thick, yellow mud. In the distance, the road to Korolowka was littered with burnt-out German tanks and machinery, but for Esther and her family, the sight of their war-torn homeland was one of the most beautiful things they had ever seen.

Sixty years later, in the soft afternoon light of the Stermers’ living room in Montreal, the survivors recounted their memories of their liberation with quiet awe. Shulim was silent for the first time all afternoon, and Shlomo said repeatedly, “It was a beautiful, beautiful day.”

“When we came out the sun must have been shining,” Pepkale said. At five years old, she had spent nearly a third of her life underground. “I told my mother, I said, ‘Close the candle! Turn out the light!’ I couldn’t believe it. I had forgotten completely what the sun was.”

Their town of Korolowka had been almost completely destroyed. Of the more than 14,000 Jews that lived in the region before World War II, barely 300 had survived. Even with the Germans gone, Ukraine remained a dangerous place. After surviving the Nazi Holocaust, both Zaida Stermer and Fishel Dodyk were killed that summer by local Ukrainians.

Of the more than 14,000 Jews that lived in the region before World War II, barely 300 had survived.

The Stermers told no one about their underground refuge; who knew when they might need to take to it again? They abandoned Korolowka forever in June 1945, finally arriving at a displaced-persons camp in Fernwald, Germany, in November. They spent the next few weeks eating, showering, and sleeping securely for the first time in more than half a decade. Family photos from that period show the survivors dressed in tailored shirts and jackets and posing defiantly, as if nothing in the world could defeat them.

In 1947 the Stermers arrived in Canada. Nissel took up work as a butcher. Shulim found a factory job. Esther and her daughters became homemakers. The three brothers eventually found success in the construction business, drawing on many of the skills they had learned underground. Yet even among their closest friends, they talked little of their experiences.

Today, the Stermers’ survival saga continues to shape virtually everything about their lives. Some, like Pepkale, travel with small stashes of food to safeguard against the possibility of going hungry. Many of the survivors remain devoutly religious, both in spite of and because of their time underground.

As Chris and I prepared to leave, the Montreal skyline was going dark. Most of Shulim’s relatives were gone, and his apartment was still and quiet.

“When we get together like this and I see the grandchildren, and it’s an affair,” he said at the door, “I see the family and I see nice kids. And I say to myself, ‘It was worth the fight to survive.’ “







Click here to purchase "The Secrets of the Priest's Grotto: A Holocaust Survival Story," by Peter Lane Taylor, with Chris Nicola

What do you know about the ERR?

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The ERR (Einstazst Reichsleiter Rosenberg) was an organization founded in 1940 by the Nazis to ‘collect’ (steal) art from Jews who were deprted to 'correction facilities' (concentration and death camps).

Presently, the ERR is held responsible for stolen Jewish Art from WWII. Some paintings remained with the Nazis, while others were sold to art dealers for wonderful deals.

As of now, there are still over 100,000 Jewish artifacts that have not been returned to Jews.

Organizations have been created, legislations passed to locate the art dealers and stolen pieces of art. There were investigations in museums, where the history of of the paintings’ ownership was murky during years 1940-1945.

I spent a nice part of today reading about the ERR and the work that has been done to restore Jewish property to its proper owners, the legal aspects, etc…

Below are websites that contain fascinating information, so if you have time to kill, you know what to do.

1) ERR (Einstazstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg) Card File and Related Photographs, 1940-1945

2) Nazi Looted Art, The Holocaust Preservation Project, Part 1, Anne Rothfeld

3) Terezin Declaration on Holocaust Era Assets and Related Issues

4) THE ACTUAL POST WAR REPORT RECORDING ALL THE DEALERS AND WORKS OF ART TAKEN. Phenomenal! Must read

5) The War Over Plunder: Who Owns Art Stolen in War? Colin Woodard