The List

The family rode from one town to another without food and slept along the way. A week later they arrived in Stocheck-Wengrofsky and stayed for three months. The Burstyn clan then continued towards the Bug River and arranged to cross it. Eventually they got to Bialystok and went to the first place they could think of – the synagogue. It was packed with people, so that night, the family slept on the street. Luckily, a relative got them an apartment where they were able to stay for a few months.

The German troops, following the same route, soon reached Bialystok, and the Burstyns again fled the bombs, heading east to Orsha, near Minsk, Belarus, where they were incarcerated in a slave labor camp for 18 months, from April 1940 until October 1941. After being released, they continued heading east by train, almost starved to death, and eventually came to Tashkent, Uzbekistan, but were told they had to leave. The family ended up in Kyrgyzstan, where they worked in the cotton fields near the Uzbeki border.

My father’s life began in Dokshitzy, a town 68 miles northeast of Minsk, which at the time was part of the Second Polish Republic. His father died when he was 10 years old, and his mother was left to feed five children on the slim wages of a seamstress. To bring in extra income, my father was sent to work in a relative’s bakery in Vilna, where he studied at the Slobodka Yeshiva, until the Rebbe realized he was more interested in Communism than the Talmud. Conscripted into the Polish army, he could not join his family when they emigrated to Palestine in 1935. When the Polish army was defeated at the start of World War II, my father returned to Vilna and then escaped to live with relatives in Illya, Belarus. Until the Germans invaded, life under Russian rule from September 1939 until June 1941 was tranquil. Then, on Purim 1942, the Germans dragged Jews out of their homes to the town square, had them dig a pit, stripped them and shot them so they fell into the mass grave they dug for themselves. By noon the Germans killed 1,500 men, women, and children. Then they poured gasoline over the bodies and set them on fire to get rid of “the evidence.”

Every night, Ivan Safanov, an acquaintance and righteous gentile, sent his children to bring them food and wash their lice infested clothes. He eventually persuaded the partisans to accept them. My father was valuable to them even without a rifle. During his time in the Polish Army, my father had learned to fix ammunition blindfolded and was an expert saboteur. He received many medals for bombing railroad tracks, and German army stations. Toward the end of the war, he and his fellow partisans joined the Red Army, where he was assigned to the liberating forces as a translator in Berlin.

My father was very disillusioned with God and religion, as was the rest of his family, with the exception of his mother – who was very pious and lived in Mea Shearim with her second husband, a rabbi of a synagogue and Beit Midrash.

My Jewish identity emerged in the United States when I became cognizant of Christians. I recall often asking new acquaintances, “Are you Christian or Jewish?” I was enrolled in public school, in Borough Park, Brooklyn and attended Talmud Torah in the afternoons. On Saturdays, we were required to go to junior congregation. I became congregation president, excelled in the classroom, koshered my house for Passover, instituted the family’s Friday night Shabbat ritual and meal. I sat next to my father for Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, enveloped in his tallit (prayer shawl) as he taught me how pray. As I got older, I had to sit next to my mother and the rest of the women in their section of the Orthodox synagogue.

The shock of learning about the persecution of Jews came when we visited relatives and I was flipping through a coffee table book with pictures of heaps of dead bodies. I don’t recall asking any questions. Also, one of my mother’s cousins, Herschele, from her hometown, lost his wife and children in “The War,” der milchume. He never remarried and lived with his brother and his family. Every summer when I visited them for a few days in Brighton Beach, Herschele would always greet me with a smile. I knew of his loss but was given no details.

My awareness intensified, but still felt amorphous until I met Dina Rosenfeld, on the first day of seventh grade. She was born in Rumania to parents who each lost their spouses and children during the Holocaust. Her father was imprisoned after the war for political beliefs and died of a heart attack soon after he was released. Dina’s mother had a number on her arm, and visits to their apartment evoked loss and mourning.