Most amazing story of a little girl's survival during the holocaust years in Ludmir then in eastern Poland - now in Ukraine - as various occupation armies, and Poland before that beginning in thirties, made survival difficult to impossible for Jews, deliberately, with decrees and actions towards the purpose.
Story of Rachel Blum, amongst younger if several children of a decent widower who did his best for the children, begins here as they need one of them to go find food, and while she argues against her own going out, winning the argument, later changes her mind and manages to do it, in the process developing the courage and resourcefulness that went a long way in her survival during those years.
Remarkable also is how many people were willing to shelter the fugitives despite fear of reprisals if caught (although that includes a particularly shameful one about the farmer who gave such shelter only to murder the refugees which included her sister and then, having confessed and presumably absolved, bragged about it, which is how Rachel heard of it), and the story of the Russian couple Ivan and Maria Roluk and their son Stephen, who sheltered her the longest during the last part of her holocaust years.
Quoted from the book at a point where the story is in its last quarter, it's past April 1944, close to liberation by Russia in fact which was about July 22, and the little girl was seen by an SS general with medals for battle of Stalingrad:-
"It is worthwhile to pause a moment and examine the incredible, irrational hatred known as anti-Semitism. The Nazis were on the verge of defeat. The Russians were perhaps a few days away. Yet, this general — a decorated German warrior with medals for bravery — was worried that perhaps this little girl was Jewish. Despite everything else he had to deal with, his mind was still consumed with the thought of finding and killing every last Jew!"
A bit later, when Germany is defeated, and the four are back in Ludmir,
"Meanwhile, tragedy strikes the Roluk home. Soviet soldiers come and arrest Stephan. Others informed on him that he worked for the SS. No amount of explaining helps and he is sent to Siberia.
"The Soviets under Josef Stalin didn’t need an excuse to execute and imprison their own citizens. Even Soviet prisoners of war — Russian soldiers who fought against the Nazis and put their lives on the line for Stalin — were treated as traitors upon their return to the Soviet Union after the war. Remarkably, according to some sources, over 1.5 million surviving Red Army soldiers imprisoned by the Germans came home and were immediately sent to Stalin’s dreaded Siberian labor camps, for no other reason than they were captured by the Nazis!"
This story, true account of holocaust survival of a real person, Rachel Blum, was recorded by her son in law during her last few years, as he tells:-
"My mother-in-law was the most active, upbeat person imaginable. Her greatness was not merely that she said, “Nothing bad ever happened to me,” despite her experiences, but that she lived it.
"However, until the last five years of her life, I never really knew what she went through. She had never told me or anyone in her family, for that matter. My wife and her siblings knew nothing about their mother’s Holocaust experiences, other than that she had horrifying experiences. This was the norm for many, many Holocaust survivors. It was as if there was an unwritten contract between them that went, “You don’t ask, and I won’t tell.”
"Then something happened in 2008. I asked my mother- in-law if she could repeat a Holocaust story I once heard her say — the story of how she made the Roluks swear on their Bible that when they find Jews after the war, to rebury her in a Jewish cemetery — and I asked her if I could record it. She agreed. Once she began telling it to me, she began telling me other stories. And others. They kept coming... and coming. I couldn’t get her to stop. Not that I wanted her to. But they started pouring out.
"Although we loved each other as son-in-law and mother- in-law, I was distant enough yet safe enough for her to tell me things she would never tell her biological children or a nonrelated interviewer. (I asked her several times if she wanted to be interviewed by an official Holocaust organization; she was always strongly against it. She was afraid of her memories and only trusted me to share them.) In short, she opened to me like no one else. After that first time, we continued almost daily for several weeks until I collected hours and hours of recordings.
"I stood in awe as each part of her overall story slowly came into sharp focus. It needed to happen slowly because she told her experiences from the inside out — not necessarily chronologically, and often transitioning from one story to the next without warning or explanation. Furthermore, she often assumed that I knew the background of what she was talking about, whether it was regarding her personal history or the history of the Holocaust. I often had to hear her repeat a story or part of it several times over several sessions before I fully grasped what she was saying.
"The story that illustrates this best is the train story. One day, as I was rather numbly listening to her segue into a story about a train, I interrupted her and asked, “Wait a second, Bubby. Did I hear you right? Did you just tell me that you killed one thousand Nazi SS soldiers?”
“Yeah,” she said matter-of-factly. “What a life,” she added with her signature chuckle.
"Once after another time delay in my comprehension, I asked, “Wait, Bubby, stop. Did you just say that you were in Majdanek right after it was liberated?”
"“Yeah.” Chuckle, chuckle. “What a life.”
"After hours and hours of interviews, a truly incredible story emerged. From growing up in poverty-stricken Poland during the 1930s to witnessing war, getting locked in a brutal Nazi ghetto, smuggling food for herself and her family, hiding in an attic to escape a liquidation that took some 18,000 lives, being taken in by a non-Jewish couple whose son worked for the SS, being confronted by an SS general, and partaking in an incredibly dangerous scheme to escape a train filled with Nazis, my mother-in-law’s real-life drama is a case of truth being stranger than fiction, and one packed with nonstop action."
Most remarkable indeed!
And what helps in reading this, especially for a reader who has read a few accounts before this, is the very spare character of the sketch this work is, despite very clear details all along - so one keeps speeding along with the protagonist in her story, inexorably despite fears about what else she might have to go through.
