By DONALD HARRISON, editor and publisher of San Diego Jewish World
Volume 2, Number 133
Posted: Tuesday, June 03, 2008
THE JEWISH CITIZEN
Masterful retelling of Shoah in Vilna
Until Our Last Breath by Michael Bart and Laurel Corona, St Martin's Press, 2008, 308 pages including end notes, U.S. $25.95.
"SAN DIEGO--This is a history in which excellent research by Michael Bart is married to the fine writing of Laurel Corona, a writer with a straightforward style who, for the most part, lets the facts of the Holocaust speak for themselves.
The result is an engrossing account about the parents of Michael Bart of San Diego and the experience of the Jews of Vilna during the Holocaust. We glimpse their life before the war, experience the torment of the ghetto, break loose with them to the forests to join the partisans, and weep with relief when after the war they reach the safety of life in America.
The author's parents were married just before the Nazis overran the Lithuanian ghetto, which was home to the freedom fighters. Unable to escape, they took to the surrounding forests and joined a resistance movement that challenged the mighty Nazi blitzkrieg.
Most adult readers already are familiar with the chronology of the Nazis’ genocide against the Jews; what this book does perhaps better than others is to help us understand the calculations that captive Jews made as they weighed whether this choice or that would more likely result in their staying alive.
Life in the ghetto was not simply a passive affair, waiting for the executioner; it was a deadly chess game. The trouble was the Nazis had bishops, knights, castles, and a queen, and the Jews had but a few pawns.
Should they report for a work assignment, or should they stay hidden in a maline (a secret hiding place in a building)? If they don't work, they won't get a ration card for food; but if they do go to work, it may be to dig their own graves in Ponary, the forest where tens of thousands of Jews were machine-gunned into pits.
Should they try to recruit every able-bodied Jew to a resistance movement in order to have sufficient numbers, or should they keep the resistance a secret in order to better their chances of not being discovered?
Should they attempt guerrilla warfare against the Germans in the ghetto, and possibly bring massive retaliation on the entire population, or should they wait until they can escape the city and join the partisans in the forests?
Once in the forest, should they kill Nazi sympathizers who live on the farms they must raid for food, or should they send them away?
Should they allow themselves to be integrated into other Partisan units of Lithuanians or Soviet fighters, or should they maintain their separate identity as Jewish fighters?
Into these kinds of questions are woven the personal stories of Leizer Bart and Zenia Lewison Bart, he a Polish Jew, she a Lithuanian Jew. Once her "higher class," in the view of her family, would have prevented them from making a marriage, but these were extraordinary times.
Leizer had secretly been a member of the resistance, even while serving as a German-supervised Jewish gate guard at the ghetto. In this job, he sometimes had to make a big show of patting down someone returning from work outside the ghetto, and if indeed he felt contraband under that person's jacket, to keep right on patting without changing expression.
But could that person be a Nazi agent, carrying the contraband to test him? If he allowed the person to pass through, would he be shot?
As a member of the Jewish police force, Bart often fell under the suspicion of the other ghetto residents, who, not knowing of his role in the resistance, wondered if he was a collaborator with the Nazis. But eventually his judiciousness and demeanor won him a reputation among the Lithuanian Jews as "one of the good ones."
Zenia had met him at a social affair, and was drawn to the shy man until she learned of his gate guard role. Then she wanted nothing to do with him, until friends persuaded her that he was different from the others.
They began to spend more and more time together, never alone, because in a ghetto where strange families were required to share the rooms of small apartments, and even beds, couples were never alone. Even in the forest, where Partisans slept together in bunkers, they were not alone. Alone had to wait until after the war, but at least Leizer and Zenia were able to be together.
And when at last Leizer told Zenia of his role in the resistance--which she did not know even existed--she decided that she would choose to join the Partisans too, even if it meant going to the forest with him and leaving her family behind in the ghetto.
So many, many choices--but none of these choices were of their choosing."
Harrison, editor and publisher of San Diego Jewish World,
may be contacted at editor@sandiegojewishworld.com
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