Today, April 14, is Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, for the six million Jews killed during World War II simply because they were Jewish. To my knowledge, all but one of my father’s and mother’s immediate families in Poland at the start of World War II were slaughtered by Nazis and their Ukrainian henchmen. The only survivor was my father’s brother, Willy, 24-years-old at the start of the war.
Uncle Willy’s wartime experience had all the suspense and plot twists of a Hollywood movie. Unlike my father who moved from Ottynia, a shtetl in Galicia, the southeastern part of Poland, to Danzig, and from there to New York, in January 1939, Willy returned from Danzig to their small town where he married and had a son. At the outbreak of the war, the Soviet Union took control of the area under the Polish Partition agreement secretly negotiated with Nazi Germany. Today, Ottynia is part of Ukraine.
In June 1941 Germany invaded Russian territory, quickly occupying the Galicia region. Mass executions of Jews began. Willy survived the first mass killings as he happened to be away from the village that day. He would sneak back into town to see his mother until it was no longer possible to do so before she too was murdered with the rest of the known Jewish residents in October.
For the next two years he hid out in barns and fields as German soldiers and their Ukrainian sympathizers searched for the few who had managed to escape. His existence depended on an ability to stay one step ahead of the Nazis and to find Polish peasants willing to risk their lives to shield Jews.
His existence resembled scenes from a war movie. Moving from one hiding place to another. Staying stone silent inside a hidden chamber of a potato bin as a soldier banged his rifle butt on the side listening for a hollow sound. Jumping into an open cesspool when German troops came to the barn he was hiding in. Finally, joining up with partisans to fight, eventually being liberated by the advancing Russian army which conscripted him and sent him to Siberia for basic training where he ate grass to survive for lack of food.
When it was time to go to the front Willy was saved by a peculiar Russian military custom. When his unit was ready to be sent to the Western Front to fight the Germans, they mustered at the base. The commandant asked if any soldier had reason not to be sent to the battle lines. Willy and several other Jewish soldiers stepped forward. They told the officer they did not fear the Germans. What they feared was getting shot in the back by their fellow soldiers, many of whom were anti-Semitic Ukraines. The commandant kept them in Siberia. Willy always suspected he was sympathetic because secretly he might have been Jewish.
Could be. According to Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem, “About 500,000 Jewish soldiers fought in the Red Army during World War II. Some 120,000 were killed in combat and in the line of duty; the Germans murdered 80,000 as prisoners of war. More than 160,000, at all levels of command, earned citations, with over 150 designated “Heroes of the Soviet Union”— the highest honor awarded to soldiers in the Red Army” (https://www.yadvashem.org/holocaust/about/combat-resistance/jewish-soldiers.html).
After the war ended, Willy reconnected with my father. He was able to emigrate to Cuba. On a visit to New York he met and married Ethel. They had one child, Max. Willy opened a dry goods store on First Avenue between 10th and 11th Streets in Manhattan. Most of his customers were immigrants, many from Eastern and Central Europe. English was barely spoken in the store, but Uncle Willy was always able to communicate with them, in their languages.
