Episode 2: Rumors

SPEAKER_01 0:01

In this chapter of Yasha's story, we came to our mother's house, and rumor starts that the Germans each day they took more territories. We need to pack and go somewhere. One way it is the river. At night, all the time, the Germans will come and bounce the shore of the river. But we are afraid because we can hear this plane come and woo-woo-woo-woo.

SPEAKER_02 0:37

Hundreds of thousands of Jewish families were displaced when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union during World War II. Those who evaded Nazi death camps were faced with a perilous journey eastward in order to survive. This is the true tale of one of those families, told by the son who lived through it all. His Russian nickname is Yasha, and this is his story.

SPEAKER_00 2:17

It is not merely a war between two armies, it is a great war of the entire Soviet people against the German fascist forces. The Red Army, the Red Navy, and all citizens of the Soviet Union must defend every inch of Soviet territory. Fight until the last drop of blood for our cities and villages, and must display the courage, initiative, and sharpness inherent in our people. Comrades, our forces are innumerable. The arrogant enemy will soon realize this. All the forces of the people for the destruction of the enemy. Forward to our victory.

SPEAKER_02 3:26

Ignoring ample intelligence to the contrary, Stalin refused to believe that Hitler would betray him. And even though the Soviet Red Army was formidable in its own right, Stalin's stubbornness and ego rendered his nation woefully unprepared for an adversary of the proportions and veracity of Nazi Germany. Despite this, Stalin's radio address on July 3rd, 1941, rallied Soviet citizens to action and assured them that no one could defeat the mighty Soviet Union. One of those citizens was 11-year-old Yasha, who, along with his sister Tanya and her newborn son, had escaped from Lunanitz, a town near the border that was among the first to experience the thunderous sound of Eric sirens. They had reunited with Yasha's mother and other siblings in Petrokov, Belarus, 130 kilometers to the east. I'm not sure if Itka knew that her son, daughter, and new grandson were on their way back home, or if the suddenness of the evacuation made their return a surprise. But having been separated for the better part of two years, I don't imagine it affected the intensity of her hugs when they arrived. Yasha's three other sisters, Gala, Sonia, and Masha, and his brother, Moisha, would have also been there to greet them. For the first time in a while, the whole family was together.

SPEAKER_01 5:06

We came to our mother's house, and we stayed there maybe a month or more a little bit. And rumors started the journals they push ahead, they go each day. And rumors starts that the journals killed Jewish people.

SPEAKER_02 5:56

As Hitler's war machine penetrated further into Soviet territory, more and more evacuees from the West started flowing through Yasha's hometown. And they brought rumors with them. 3,800 civilians slaughtered in Kaunas, Lithuania. 2,000 more in Lviv, Ukraine. Another 2,000 in Minsk, Belarus, just 200 kilometers away. The killing? Unprovoked. The victims, all Jewish. In a time and place without internet, cell phones, or even TVs, when even the so-called reliable sources of information were propaganda-laced radio broadcasts and newspaper articles supplied by a totalitarian government. Word of mouth was often all people had to go on. And as the German advance pushed on, and rumors of Nazi atrocities became more widespread, Jewish families in particular had to act or choose not to, based on a hunch. Yasha's mother, my great-grandmother, had a choice to make. Dismiss the rumors as gossip, wait it out, and entrust her family's safety to the capabilities of the Soviet Red Army, or even the presumed hospitality of the invaders. Or heed the rumors as a warning sign. Leave now, by whatever means necessary, and abandon everything familiar toward a nameless future. Be honest, what would your gut tell you to do?

SPEAKER_01 7:50

My mom said, we need to run away. We cannot stay there.

SPEAKER_02 8:04

Yasha perhaps wouldn't have understood, after arriving back home just weeks earlier, why he had to pack his belongings and leave all over again. And his mother would have had to defend her decision to the whole family without much basis. Just those rumors, that hunch in her gut that told her to leave. Even though German forces had already wreaked havoc along almost the entire length of the Soviet Union's western border. During this unpredictable time, many families in small towns and villages in the western regions of the country not only had to decide whether to leave, but they also had to devise their own means of escape.

SPEAKER_01 9:31

Go to the river, and maybe you'll find some way to go away from this town.

SPEAKER_02 9:57

Petrikov was one of those towns, and now Yasha's mother and other Jewish families hoped it would provide a different kind of lifeline as a swift-flowing mode of escape.

SPEAKER_01 10:09

One thing because when there in the river was a lot of small boats? But most of the people they deliver was not Jewish people. And they allow and a lot of Jewish people came to deliver the warly, and they allowed to take their walls and just go.

SPEAKER_02 11:39

But if you zoom into the scenes of hardship and locate stories like Yasha's in between the fault lines, you can find the exact opposite. Complete strangers helping each other, putting aside their differences and disagreements, and sacrificing their own needs for their fellow human, even when they don't have to. For many people living on the banks of the Prepat, their small boats were surely an integral part of their livelihood. To be willing to give them away to fleeing Jewish families, they had to put their priorities second, and their faith in the same gut feelings as Itka and others that made the difficult decision to leave. It wasn't their responsibility to help, especially during a time when antisemitism was on the rise. But they did it anyway, and they did it voluntarily. It was a town of about 5,000, and as Yasha points out, many of the residents were Jewish. However, the Jewish community wasn't isolated. Families lived intermixed among other families, and people of different nationalities and religions resided, worked, and socialized where they liked. In another victory for the bright side of humanity, I found stories of severe flooding from the river that occurred in the town's lowlands every spring, causing water to reach the windowsills of houses that stood there. During these times, those who lived in the upper part of town regularly opened their homes to those who were flooded out, often accommodating four or five people to a room, providing refuge, food, and camaraderie for weeks on end until the waters receded. I couldn't locate any records or stories of antisemitism or other religious animosity amongst the people of Petrakov prior to the war. The Soviet government, however, espoused a slightly different philosophy. Communist ideology was a proponent of atheism, and the Soviet system considered religion of any kind to be, as communist pioneer Karl Marx put it, an opiate of the masses, incompatible with the goals of building a socialist society. As secular ideology wove deeper into the fabric of Soviet society in Petrakov and elsewhere, religious teachings and practices were actively discouraged, places of worship were often targeted, and religious organizations faced restrictions and persecution. My grandfather told us on occasion that he did not grow up religious. But I'm not sure whether this was due to government oppression or to the simple fact that being a devout follower of Judaism, or any faith for that matter, frequently took a back seat to making sure you had enough food. In small towns like Petrikov, being religious was often reserved for the privileged or the brave. But despite Judaism in practice not being a big part of Yasha's upbringing, it was woven into his DNA via his ancestral roots and the family traditions that had been passed down for generations. Above all, it was Yasha's heritage that made him Jewish, and that seems to have bound him harmoniously with others in Petrakov. But it was also that heritage that Nazi ideology hijacked in its designation of an inferior race, and that was about to send Yasha and his family of eight fleeing down the Prepia River. Or at least that's what they thought.

SPEAKER_01 16:01

When we fight, we fight a boat for us, and we decide, okay, we'll go by the river, by the stream. Down the stream, it is not it is not very hard to go there. Some person came from from the government and said, Are you crazy? What are you doing? You will go is this small pool. Don't go. I promise you that tomorrow or a day after tomorrow, I'll give you a barge. Yeah. Yeah, then you can go with a barge and went back. Went back to home.

SPEAKER_02 16:44

A promise from the Soviet government was nothing to bank on. But in their defense, a barge does sound a lot safer than a uh what was it? I don't remember now, it's because I mean we'll stick with small boat. And hey, who doesn't love a bout of instant good karma for those selfless people on the shore who are now able to keep theirs?

SPEAKER_01 17:11

In two days, some because it's a small, a small town, it's starting to hear. Oh, yeah, we came up to the region once we live there. But we didn't ever everything man said, okay, we have to put this on the columns and the house. We can talk a cellar in the house. Usually it is a date or we keep over winter and some stuff like this. And we put all our stuff in the cellar and close the cellar.

SPEAKER_02 17:55

What would you choose to bring and to leave behind if you had to pack your life into a couple suitcases and had no idea where you were going or how long you'd be gone? This was the challenge for countless families who had to prioritize their needs with no context in which to prioritize. Luckily, people in that time didn't have as many things as we do now. Besides, for most, they were banking on the fact that this was all just temporary.

SPEAKER_01 18:26

And we decide, okay, we'll come. But is it okay in a couple of weeks we'll come back? It is just.

SPEAKER_02 18:33

For Yasha's mother and so many more, the decision to leave was made only out of an abundance of caution, on the very premise of a round-trip journey. In the next week or two, surely, Yasha and his siblings would come back to the house that saw them grow up. They'd unpack all their suitcases and go back to their lives. This was just a sojourn on a river deeper into the Soviet Union, whose warm core would provide brief sanctuary until the Nazis were chased back from the extremities. Little did they know, their temporary retreat was to become their permanent exodus, severing all ties with the only home they knew. For Yasha, this would include one particularly cherished companion.

SPEAKER_01 19:31

We had a cat and I was very much in love with the cat. I love her so much. I slept with her. I would just how to wear like a mum, I cannot leave the cat here. Mum said, nothing we can do. I cannot take the cat. We are not going by ourselves. What I did, I simply everybody from the went a little bit further. I put a stick and I broke a small window in my house. Before I left the house, I put all the milk and sour milk and whatever I got. I put it in a big, big in a pan and whatever. Something like this is. I decided the cat will have at least to eat a little bit. And I broke the window that they'll go up. Okay. This is the story with my cat. I left my cat and I'm sure I didn't see it before more anymore.

SPEAKER_02 20:40

It's amazing what snippets from your childhood your brain holds on to and what fades into the background. Of all the memories Yasha could have conjured up to illustrate this pivotal moment, it's his childhood cat who pounces into the story and takes the limelight in typical feline fashion. I suppose I can relate in some way. Certain memories of our first family dog, a little red dachshund named Rudy, remain so vivid in my head that I could recount them to you as if they happened yesterday. I'll spare you those, but I can attest, the love between a child and their furry friend is pure. Even the name of Yasha's childhood cat endured the decades. It was Mirka, and she was surely the chief item that Yasha was devising a way to take with him on the river. After his mother instilled the impossible logistics of traveling on a barge with a cat, he took action. And I like to think his actions here made a difference. With the food stores that Yasha left out for her, an easy escape route to the outdoors, and the undoubted resourcefulness of a Soviet cat in the 40s. Surely Mirka was able to do what cats do best survive. Despite losing her human compatriots, she probably hung around the house and became a glutton, sipping on her hoard of milk and slipping out that broken window at will to stalk birds and rodents. Sure, we could be sentimental about it and suggest that she missed Yasha, that she moped around all day, reminiscing on the good times with her human friends and sleeping partner. And hey, maybe she did. But let's be honest here, cats aren't typically the most tender-hearted of creatures. Call me unfeeling, but to me, it's more likely that empty house became her queendom. A place where she could snooze cozily in her owner's blankets, manicure her claws on any furniture she wanted, and perch the summer days away outside that broken window, surveying the scurrying rodents of Petrikov. Whatever the final fate of Yasha's feline friend, one thing is for sure. If Mirka did stick around, it wouldn't have been long before she was joined by another species of hunter. I shudder to imagine what she might have witnessed on those same streets where she stalked her prey. When men with tall black boots and lightning bolts on their collars marched into town to find theirs. When they pounded on doors and rounded up residents by the river. When the crack of gunfire echoed uncontested off the brick-lined streets. Maybe it would have sent her scurrying into hiding, like her human counterparts. Or perhaps she would have just tilted her head at it all, contemplating only how it might affect her next meal, her afternoon catnap, or her continuing rain in a town now eerily vacant. Without the burden of introspection or empathy, Yasha's cat could have simply gone about her life. But for her former roommates and so many other men, women, and children, those men arriving in their town changed everything. When humans act like animals, there's a lot to envy about the real ones.

SPEAKER_01 24:30

We went to this river with we went to this batch, and it was too bad. One batch for us, not for us to say personally, but for all these people decided to believe that it was like one way to use a politics.

SPEAKER_02 25:14

The journey had begun. After passing through Petrikov, the Prepiet River snakes east across southern Belarus for about 60 kilometers before bending south toward Ukraine, flowing through a portion of one of the largest wetland areas on the continent. The fleeing families and orphans of Petrikov were floating their way through the vast Prepiet marshes, a 270,000 square kilometer labyrinth of winding waterways, dense woods, and boggy lowlands, punctuating a desolate, rural landscape. Dotted along the riverbanks were small agricultural villages, with names I can't pronounce, but architecture similar to that in Petrakov. Small houses built from wood, thatched roofs, and small gardens. Many of them belonged to other Jewish families who surely gazed on as two barges full of human cargo drifted by. An endless, mundane expanse of hot, humid marshland. Yet, amidst the dreary landscape and uncertain times, a glimmer of hope suddenly emerged. And young Yasha was about to find his attention dramatically summoned to the second barge. Not by the scenery, but by a calling of the sugary variety.

SPEAKER_01 28:25

The second barge with a gift, and together with the kids, they put some food. We can give anything. They got a lot of cookies for the kids. They collect cookies and they've got them in boxes with cookies. And they knew that they they couldn't use up all these cookies. They invite kids like me from the from the bar to have cookies, and I ate cookies, I was in heaven.

SPEAKER_02 28:59

I have no historical context to provide. Cookies are delicious, regardless of time and place. I do find it odd and a little comical that Yasha doesn't mention his siblings here. Surely his similarly aged sisters and brother were also invited to partake in this rare delicacy of both quality and quantity. But it's I ate cookies, not we ate cookies. Almost as if Yasha was still hoarding that saccharine treasure trove in his memory to that day. But while his surroundings faded into a haze of sweet indulgence, an all-too real reminder of just why they were on that barge in the first place would soon appear on the darkening horizon.

SPEAKER_01 29:52

At night, all the time, the journals will come. And not us, but they will the shore of the river some effective bridges. But we also free because we can hear this link. Very scary.

SPEAKER_02 30:42

Soon, the whine of their engines, the drone of their approaching squadrons, and the scream of their dive bombers would become panic-inducing. A chilling prelude for what was to come. For Yasha and his family, the identity of their nocturnal invaders may have been shrouded by darkness, but everyone on those barges would have been wide awake to the thunderous rumble of their payloads pounding Soviet soil. Far away from the light of any major cities, I can imagine the night sky becoming a backdrop for a terrifying light show. Flashes of orange and red briefly illuminating a blue-black canvas as bombers sabotaged the dark horizon. This time, there was nowhere for Yasha to hide. No forest canopy to shield him. No trees to provide even an artificial sense of security. He was exposed, helpless, a sitting duck in the dark at the will of the current. Those nights on the prepiet, I wouldn't be surprised if rivers joined the street as places Yasha didn't like.

SPEAKER_01 32:46

They gave us these cars. We opened the doors and it was nobody could eat. It was steel. Dust from the coal is everywhere. We went inside we didn't move. The cold dust inside. And we need to breathe some stuff. It was still.

SPEAKER_02 33:15

Yasha was back on a train again. Except this time it wasn't meant for people and it wasn't going home. As you'll come to find out, the Ukrainian city of Neprotro Netropotrovsk was just the first of many pit stops on an Odyssey of unknown destinations traversed on numerous modes of transport under the ever-fleeting notion of safety. But on this particular leg of his journey, I'm struck by a grim parallel, one that seems to constantly lurk in Yasha's shadow. As I imagine the Jewish passengers on that coal train, straining to breathe through the dust, the whites of their eyes stark against their now soot-covered faces. It's hard not to think about the millions more who would be forced onto similar trains under similarly inhuman conditions. They too were en route to an unknown destination, but with one key difference. They weren't being railed away from danger, but straight into it. It's well documented that the Nazis captured and repurposed Soviet railway infrastructure to transport millions of victims of the Holocaust. It's a distressing but real possibility that if Yasha and his family somehow got stuck in that city, even if just for a few more weeks, their Jewish heritage might have still seen them onto a train meant for non-human cargo, but operated by different people into a very different location. This early period in Yash's story demonstrates, perhaps better than any other, the razor-thin margins of survival on which he and his family balanced during this unprecedented time in history. From his privileged evacuation from Lunanets, to his family's fortuitous barge escape from Petrokov and the Prepia Marshes, to now ending up on a coal train heading further away from the front. Any single factor, a delay, a decision, or the slightest twist of fate could have changed everything. And it's really not that hard to imagine his story going a very different way, as it did for so many families just like his. I asked you earlier in the episode, when rumors first arose of Nazi cruelties, what would you have chosen to do? Knowing what ultimately happened, it might be tempting to look back and say, of course I would have left. And of course Yasha's mother made the only sensible choice by doing the same. But as the old saying goes, hindsight is always 2020. The truth is, what was beginning to take shape in Eastern Europe during that time was easy to dismiss. With the lack of solid information and the tendency of human nature to believe what's convenient, it would have been reasonable to denounce the rumors as hearsay. Over reactions dictated by fear. It's a military operation. Why would the Germans kill innocent people? Why would they have it out for Jews? Germany is full of Jews. They won't make it this far. Didn't you hear, Comrade Stalin? No one can defeat the Red Army. For the people of Petrokov and so many more, these all too easy miscalculations led to the most horrific of consequences. Even though three generations and an incalculable array of cultural and technological shifts separate me from my great-grandmother, one single decision she made in the summer of 1941 not only saved her family, but traversed decades and paved the way for the existence of future generations, including yours truly. In the next chapter of Yasha's story, his coal train arrives in the rugged Caucasus Mountains in the South, where he and his family are given refuge and are put to work on one of Stalin's infamous collective farms. But as always, stability and safety are fleeting. If you enjoyed this episode and you'd like to help support the podcast, please share it with others and leave a rating or review wherever you're listening. And don't forget to follow to stay involved in the story. There's more to come. I hope you'll join us again.