Efforts to Escape

The answer is no less painful than the question. The physical surroundings might have been the natural ally of the victims, but the neighboring people, which lived side by side with the Jews, were an active partner with the enemy, victimizing their Jewish neighbors. This is a great source of pain. This nation - the Ruthenian-Ukrainian people of Marmaros, who were raised alongside and together with the Jews for at least the prior 7 or 8 generations, betrayed its neighbor in times of trouble in a low, cruel, and ugly manner. The Ruthenians, whose children played with Jewish children in the village, in the grove, in the field and wood; they who sold their produce and bought their household and farm needs from their Jewish neighbors for the past 250 years; they who included their Jewish neighbors in all their worries and joys, whose sick were healed by Jewish doctors; over whose wounds were uttered prayers by Jewish women; whose babies were brought into the world by Jewish midwives; whose litigations were ruled upon by Rabbis, Halachic Judges and ritual slaughterers, simply because the non-Jews preferred the Jewish wisdom and sense of decency over their own judicial system or priest; this nation which drowned its sorrow and lessened its travail in Jewish taverns and at Jewish weddings and happy occasions - How did they so miserably fail the test on the day of trial? How did they hunt down and hand over Jews, entire families with their wives and children, to the Hungarian foe, which was a mutual enemy of the Ruthenian people, in exchange for a quart of liquor? Oh, Ruthenian nation, how low you stooped, down to the very depths. You betrayed your neighbor for a pittance! ! !

To the misfortune of the Jewish people, the cooperation of the overwhelming majority of Ruthenians – and a nation can be judged by its majority – with the Hungarion enemy and German Nazi was enthusiastic, vigorous and complete. This is given expression in many individual sections of this book. And what is told here is only a drop in the bucket of what has not been told and has already been forgotten. But even what is known and documented points to low, despicable deeds, the sheer numbers of which prove the rule. Already in 1941, in the catastrophic deportation of part of Marmaros Jewry to Poland and their murder there, a young boy of 11 (Zvi Kornhaus from Iasin) innocently relates that after he miraculously escaped from the valley of death and somehow returned to Iasin and hid there for 9 months in an attic, he was forced to leave his town because he was discovered by a Ruthenian woman and “the situation was very bad”, in the naive words of the little boy. Imagine, a boy of 11, who remained orphaned from both parents who were murdered before his very eyes, fears being exposed by a Ruthenian woman who might hand him over to his parents' murderers. This boy survived only because he was experienced as a Jew fleeing betrayal by Ruthenians. And if any shadow of a doubt might still remain, the shocking events of the summer of 1944 come to place things in their proper light. Let us recount several incidents, in order:

The head of the Jewish community of Middle-Apsha, Reb Dovid Ber Davidowitz, hid in his orchard. Ruthenians discovered his hiding place. “Without hesitation they handed him over to the gendarmes who tied him to one of the trees and beat him until he went out of his mind. Then he was put into the ghetto and deported to Auschwitz.

A similar incident in Upper-Apsha: Moshe Weisel's two daughters hid in a bunker which they had prepared for themselves in advance. Ruthenians were sniffing around for hiding Jews because they were promised a reward for the capture of every Jew. They discover the girls and handed them over to the gendarmes. In this case the evil designs of the Ruthenians did not come to pass. By a stroke of good fortune these girls remained alive; so did the Jews of Apsicsa, which was a tiny place near Upper-Apsha, with few Jews since most of them were already murdered in 1941. Having had that bitter experience behind them, they went into hiding in 1944 and did not enter the ghetto. Despite the searches of the Ruthenians who served as the hunting dogs of the Hungarian gendarmes, they succeded to remain in hiding for two whole months. Given the existing conditions, this was a very long time - until the detective instinct of the excellent Ruthenian police-dogs hit upon their tracks. Of course the Hungarian gendarmes were called immediately. These Jews also hit upon good fortune. Since all the ghettos in the country had already been liquidated, they were sent to Budapest, confined to a concentration-camp and managed to remain alive. The case of Ilovitch the lumber-merchant from the village of Bicskof was far more tragic: the Ruthenian who took a fabulous sum of money from him, on the promise that he would provide food for him and his family in their shelter in the forest, after receiving the money handed him over and he was placed in the ghetto.

The testimony of a Jew from the village of Ganice is quite instructive: “The Ruthenians displayed jubilation and teased the Jews, upon seeing the Jews' bitter fate. Among these, non-Jews with whom one lived and did business with, in friendship, trust and good-neighborly relationships for decades.” This man's testimony continues, “And this is one of the reasons that the Jews were deterred from escaping to the nearby forests.” In some cases the Ruthenian peasants with their own hands killed Jews who tried to hide. There were times when the Jews preferred to give themselves up to the Hungarian gendarmes rather than falling into the hands of the Ruthenians, who would torture the Jews before murdering them; and the tales of the Jews of Dibeve which assert that there were several cases of attempted escape, but not one of them was successful, for the Ruthenians took part in the chase and search for the Jews hiding in the forests and betrayed them to the gendarmes.

Typical of the sad plight of these Jews is the story of David Miller, a hired-hand from Dibeve, who by bitter experience knew the purpose of the deportation and its final destination, since his mother and 3 brothers were already exterminated at Kamenetz-Podolsk in 1941. Miller therefore escaped to the nearby forest with his wife, baby and another brother. After 2 weeks, their hiding-place was discovered by a Ruthenian peasant, who immediately turned them in. In the ensuing chase, Miller and his brother succeeded in getting away but his wife and baby were caught. To their misfortune and thanks to the meanness of the Ruthenians, Miller and his brother were also caught, after several additional weeks. A similar testimony also came from Vilhovitz, where some tens of Jews tried to hide in the woods, but returned to the village out of fear of the Ruthenians who traced and searched for them. The testimony from Tecs is also shocking, because from the local ghetto there were also some attempts to escape. The escape was not too complicated a matter - the survivors testify - the trouble was, there was nowhere to escape to. The Ruthenians were after them, etc… the refrain is always the same. But in Tecs it had local color, for Matiash Vyeditch the Ruthenian, was resourceful. In addition to the beatings he meted out to those he captured, he also put his personal stamp on them in the form of a crucifix which he shaped with their hair (including girls). Narratives about Ruthenians who turned Jew-hunting into a “business side-line” can be found under the entries: Leh-Lunka, Kasely, Krive (Czech) and others, so we won't exhaust the reader with repetition of those stories here. As was stated, the known, documented incidents are only a mere fragment of the innumerable incidents which were not preserved in writing and documentation, for the simple reason that the victims did not survive to tell the tales - but they are indellibly inscribed forever in a supreme quarter which no human hand can reach - and the High above most high will bring every hidden matter to justice.

It is not our intention to imply that the Ruthenian people, down to the last last individual, were all evil; even though certainly the vast majority acted so. There were some brief flashes of light in those dark days. We know of isolated cases where individual Ruthenians saved lives: Like the case where 4 youngsters from one family (3 daughters and one son), from the village of Kasely were saved by a Ruthenian who provided them with food even after a forest-guard discovered them and reported it to the gendarmes, who immediately began to search for them. To the credit of the Ruthenian who provided them with food, he did not give them away despite the horrible tortures inflicted on him. (By the way, the Ruthenian population of Kasely was more humane and more pleasant to the Jews. They brought food to the Jewish villagers in the ghetto (Iza) and also helped the Jews to slip away from the ghetto, in order to bring back stored food from the abandoned Jewish homes in the village.) There was also the Ruthenian, Kurateh Morsnitza who saved an entire family by hiding them in the village and elsewhere. Several days before the liberation, when nothing more could be done and he could no longer hide them, he gave the charitable act of saving them over to his friend, also a Ruthenian, who was a railroad employee. This friend fell upon an ingenious plan to save the Jews – They were placed in a sealed railroad-car which traveled from place to place and from train-station to train-station on the Neresnitza-Teresif line, until the liberation by the Red army a few days later. We also know the case of 20 year old Zalman Zalmanowitz from Bicskof, who was hidden by the Ruthenian forest guard Yuraschok. The gendarmes hunted him but came up with nothing, since Yuraschok was unwilling to betray him, despite the reward of 10 kilos of gold which they had promised for his capture.

So much for Czech Marmaros. What about Romanian Marmaros? On the Romanian side the situation was somewhat different both for the better and for the worse. In what way for the worse? Apparently, on the Romanian side, less efforts were made to slip away and escape. If this was so, the reason is clear. The Jews of Romanian Marmaros were not as experienced or as informed of the viciousness of the non-Jews and their evil intentions as their brothers were on the other side of the Tisa River. As we have already seen, the deportation decrees of 1941 did not affect the bulk of Romanian Marmaros Jewry. Only several small communities near the Tisa were involved. The overwhelming majority were not cognizant at all of the possibility of physical destruction and mass murder. No one had told them about it. Even in a city like Sziget with its 10,000 Jews, the author Eli Wiesel attests that: “The Jews of Sziget didn't know what awaited them, until the last minute… no one found it necessary to inform us of this… a year after the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, we still did not know a thing concerning the Nazi plan to exterminate European Jewry”. And even if it registered on their consciousness in a vague way, it was quickly erased by virtue of the well-known “Jewish optimism”. Therefore the Jews preferred going together with their families and with “the community of Israel”, and “What will happen to the people of Israel will also happen to the individual named Israel”, as is so well-known and familiar, and as many of us experienced ourselves, on our own “skin”.

But in Romanian Marmaros, things were also different for the better. This at least is our impression based on the data available to us and with which this book was written. Our impression is that the Romanians were more willing to help the few escapees and to stand by them in their time of distress. According to the information we have, in the two or three villages on the Romanian side of the Tisa where Ruthenians lived, the Ruthenians acted in the same shameful manner as their brothers did on the Czech side. For example, in Ober-Rina Avraham Leib Yager, who went into hiding in the neighbouring woods, was beaten to death by the Ruthenian Rumaniuk and his friends; or the example of the village Bistra, also settled by Ruthenians, where Shlomo Yoel Yunger was beaten to death by a Ruthenian peasant with a wooden beam when he was caught hiding. But to be fair we have to emphasize the noble actions of the Ruthenian Geargia Godinka who saved 8 Jews from Bistra and provided them with food. Godinka was invited to Israel by the survivors and he visited here in the winter of 1969, when he was 80 years of age.

In contrast to the behavior of the Ruthenians, the documents in our possession testify to the fact that the Romanians shared the plight of the Jews and tried to help them. Like the residents of Lower-Wisho, who brought food to the ghetto, their own and what was taken from the Jews, this despite the beatings they received at the hands of the gendarmes for doing so; and as the Jews of Budest tell us, the Romanian farmers did not cooperate with the Hungarians in searching for Jews in hiding. The fact is that 16 Jews from Budest managed to survive the months of mass-executions, until the liberation, and that the Romanian peasants not only did not betray them, but provided them with food and misled the gendarmes searching for them; similarly, the Romanians of Lower-Rina made things easier for the Jews in ghetto Slatfina, by bringing them a great deal of food. The survivors especially praise the actions of the Romanian peasant Vasile Nan, from Lower-Rina who allowed himself to be beaten and gave his life for this. About the head of the village they tell, that he suggested a plan to save all the young Jewish girls by scattering them among the neighboring villagers as peasant-girls. The Jews did not accept his offer.

In light of the above, there is no substance at all to the question: “Like sheep to the slaughter?”

The question is not why they didn't run away and escape, but on the contrary - we stand in wonder and amazement at the cases, which in the long run were not so few, where Jews decided despite the hostility of the local population and the tremendous danger on all sides - to run away from the ghetto, to be cut off from one's family and from the illusion of “being part of the group”. In most cases the attempts to run did not succeed and the escapees were tracked down and caught. We stand in awe before the heroic act of that man from the village of Brister (Zvi Farkash, who climbed out of the mass-grave, overpowers a Hungarian soldier, dons his uniform, takes his weapons, reaches Budapest and there joins the Jewish underground resistance forces; or that almost unbelievable story of those three courageous girls from Sziget (Rochel Tsifser and the Deutsch sisters, Elvira and Magda), who kill by gun-fire the non-Jew who turns from their supplier of food into an extortionist and rapist - an unprecedented incident. And from the individual to the group - that desperate attempt by four Marmaros communities, Dolha, Dibeve, Vilhovitz and Tecs, to delay their entrance into the ghetto by declaring the area as contaminated by a typhus epidemic; and back to the individual: that young girl from Veliatin, who hid away with her mother on a Romanian farm, near Satmar. And when a gigantic Hungarian gendarme caught her and beat her mercilessly for 7 consecutive hours to try and extract from her the location of her mother's hiding-place and the name of the farmer who helped them, she refused to utter a word. All of these examples of heroism and so many others like these which we never found out about, weave themselves into an epic of individual deeds of superhuman heroism. And confronted by this we ask – with admiration, as well as with agitation – How did these heroes and martyrs, who found within themselves the spiritual strength and saintly power to stand up to these killers and their cohorts – How in the end did they fall?

Peasants looting Jewish Ghetto 1944

Another Picture Of Looting

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