A section of this article was featured in the Daily Northwestern on September 1st, 2013.
She fell into the ditch thinking she was dead. All around her she breathed and touched dying human flesh. The bullet had apparently missed her. She desperately raised her arms to push through the masses of bodies that were piling on top of her. Above, she saw the glint of sunlight piercing through the forest, making its way to the Jews standing before the pit. She was naked. At that moment she did not know if she could make it to fully see the sunlight, but she wanted so desperately to live.
The girl used all her strength to climb through the sea of limbs in pursuit of the breathable air above. She stepped on limp arms and legs stained with blood. She avoided looking at the eyes, afraid she would find someone she knew. These were her countrymen, her neighbors, her family, but she could not mourn them, she had to climb up toward the light. When she finally reached solid earth, she paused to make sure the men wearing the green uniforms had gone. Seeing no one, she pulled herself up from death’s clutches.
Terrified of being seen, the girl rushed through the forest—the same where she had spent so many summer days during her youth—to a farmer’s home on the western edge of the woods. She found the barn unlocked and sneaked inside. With the farmer’s help, this is where she survived the war until the Russians came in 1945. Yet only a small piece of her was left alive.
This is the story a woman named Anne Weiss told me about how her mother survived the Shoah as we traveled through the countryside of Ukraine together. It was the place of her mother’s birth and survival. Children do not learn this story in school. They learn of Jews of Western Europe being forced into concentration camps, ghettos, and death marches. The story of Jews who did not go to the camps goes untold.
Anne Weiss’s story details a Holocaust by bullets, one that ravaged the Jewish populations in Ukraine, Belarus, and other Baltic states. While it estimated that 1.5 million Jews were murdered in Eastern Europe, their mass graves were hidden behind the Iron Curtain until 1991 and are still being discovered throughout the old Soviet bloc. We may never know how many were killed in these Nazi burial sites or how many families were destroyed. Survivors from Western Ukraine, like my grandfather, remain powerless to regain the memories of all those who perished.
However, as I searched for these lost homes and lives while traveling in Ukraine this past August, I gained a sense of ownership over the evil that perpetrated my family’s murder. There is a strange psychological power in searching for and exposing what the Nazis left behind. My grandfather’s story became my story, my people’s story. Three generations removed from the Holocaust, my sense of Jewish identity remains strongly attached to my family’s past in Ukraine. As I experienced my family’s history through my grandfather’s eyes, it became clear to me that part of us never left.
Today Ukrainians are finally accepting their role in the massacre of millions of Jews—a repentance I witnessed firsthand. This is a story of one survivor, and his pursuit to keep the perished alive.
Ukraine used to be home to over two million Jews. I grew up hearing stories from my grandfather of a thriving Jewish community in Maniewicze in the Western Volyn region. Jewish children played soccer in the streets, mothers cooked Shabbat dinner feasts every Friday night, and fathers were tailors, shoemakers, bakers, and milkmen. Fiddler on the Roof could have depicted life in Maniewicze, the small shtetl where my grandfather was born.
I arrived last August in Western Ukraine searching for the stories of my grandfather’s past. As a 90-year-old survivor of the Shoah, Chaim (Harry) Kamel was also returning to the place of his youth for the first time in 72 years. He was older and wiser, but still young in spirit. My father and I decided to tag along for the ride.
Yet we were not traveling alone. The trip was organized by Joel Susel, a businessman from Denver whose father, Sheppe Susel, was friends with my grandfather as a boy. Joel has become somewhat of Holocaust scholar after his father past away many years ago. He has become obsessed with finding remnants of his family’s history in Maniewicze, so much so that he has bought expensive Volynian Yartzeit books, talked at length with Holocaust scholars, and hired professional videographers to document our journey in Ukraine. As we met for the first time, Joel talked non-stop about finding his familial written records, his father’s old land, and the synagogue of Maniewicze—a goal he believed my grandfather could help him achieve.
Our group also included Joel’s son Zack, nephew Elliot, cousin Tamir, and others on the trip with family connections to Volyn including professors Anne Weiss, Guy Sion, and Emilie Passow. As we left Kiev on the first morning to begin the five hour trek to the Volyn region, none of us knew if we would find what we were looking for or if anything remained of Jewish Maniewicze.
Yet, my grandfather ever the optimist assured us. “We’ll find my old house and all the others. I can just feel it.”
The people of Maniewicze were warm, friendly, and inviting. As we arrived at the border of Volyn, a group of young girls in traditional Ukrainian dresses awaited us singing Volynian folk songs. The leaders of Maniewicze opened their arms to a group of Americans and Israelis with both respect and honor. My grandfather was treated like a king, a talisman of the past and life in Ukraine before the cultural uniformity of the Soviet Union.
As we entered Maniewicze, we were ushered to the local museum where locals were eagerly awaiting my grandfather’s return. A group of young children and their parents stood in the main atrium, smiling and holding poems they had written for the Holocaust survivor. When my grandfather began singing his favorite Ukrainian songs to the crowd, the children erupted in laughter. There was not a hint of anti-Semitism in the room. For a people still asserting their independence from Russia, my grandfather represented the spirit of a generation that thrived before Nazi and Soviet occupation. To them he was a hero, a relic of a free Ukraine.
Yet as we began exploring the town, nothing could hide the fact that no Jewish life remained in Maniewicze. What once was a small and bustling town, home to 4,000 Jews, no longer has any sign of Jewish life. The one hundred-year-old synagogue on Ogrotoba Street was gone, replaced by an abandoned warehouse. The Jewish doctor’s home which both Chaim and Sheppe visited as young boys became Nazi headquarters and then transformed into a Soviet government center. While parts of the town looked like they had not changed much since World War II, we struggled to find remnants of Jewish life before Nazi occupation.
On the third day, after a long search, we found the site of my grandfather’s home of 17 years, now in the center of Maniewicze. He explained that his family’s old one story, four-roomed house used to be on the periphery of the town, where most of the Jews lived together without fear of persecution. His mother, Leah, used to draw water from a well that still sits on the property. His father, Avraham the tailor, hung finished clothes in the yard.
A new house was built on the ashes of my grandfather’s old stomping ground. It is made of wood and painted white, with a brown thatched roof. A couple of windows allowed us to peek inside to see the minimal furniture, the wood-fired stove, and the pantry in the back. No one was home. My grandfather stared off into the distance, picturing the time he played with his siblings in the yard or watched his mother light the Shabbat candles.
“I wonder what would have happened if I hadn’t left Maniewicze in 1941,” he tells me. “Maybe my brothers and sisters would still be alive. Maybe I could have helped them escape.” I don’t say anything, but we both know this would have been impossible. When the Nazis arrived in Maniewicze in the summer of 1941, they took 100 Jewish men and slaughtered them. They told the wives and children that their husbands and fathers had been sent off to work. By the spring of 1942, the Nazis restricted all Jews to the ghetto, enforced curfews, and prevented business interactions between Jews and non-Jews. There would have been no hope for my grandfather or his family to escape Maniewicze.
The only building my grandfather recognized while touring old Maniewicze was the church at the far end of town. It is an impressive stone building with a gray façade, large wooden doors, and three windows on the second level. My grandfather told the group that the Cardinal of Poland once visited the site to commemorate Easter in the 1930’s. We all stood, staring at the church in silence.
Later we learned that the Nazis burned Jewish Maniewicze to the ground in 1945. All that remains are people like my grandfather willing to remember it.
What commemorates Jewish life in the small towns of Western Ukraine are mass graves hidden in forests throughout the region. In September of 1942, the remaining Jews of Maniewicze were marched by the thousands to separate large graves, dug out of sight. They were told to undress, including their shoes, and form horizontal ranks. They stood in a line facing the grave and were executed one by one. A Holocaust by bullets.
Outside of Maniewicze, the mass grave is almost invisible, located in a small clearing within a vast sea of tall pines. A wooden fence surrounds the memorial site and as our group approached, sunlight pierced through the skinny trees to fall upon the stone steps. A black stone plaque with a Jewish star at the top and Ukrainian and Hebrew writing is all that is left of Jewish Maniewicze.
The plaque reads, “More than 3,000 Jews of Maniewicze and the surrounding areas were killed here by the Germans and their helpers.” The site was commissioned in 1992 by Jews of Maniewicze and their descendants, many of whom had moved to Israel. While the Soviet Union had recognized the area as a mass grave, they did nothing to respect the site as a place where Jews were slaughtered. Ultimately it wasn’t until the fall of the Iron Curtain that the surviving Jews of Maniewicze were able to return and build a memorial.
My grandfather made his way slowly to the plaque to put his hand on it for the first time. He kissed it and stared down at the flowers and candles left by those before us. He faced the plaque and whispered words that I will remember for the rest of my life.
“Hello, Ma and Pa it’s me Chaim, your son. I came back to visit you. Your grandson and great-grandson are also here to pay their respects. I just want to tell you that I love you and that I miss you two every day.”
When my grandfather was done, we bowed our heads to say the Mourner’s Kaddish, the Jewish prayer to honor the dead. As I mouthed the words to a prayer I could say in my sleep, my mind wandered. I felt the wind blow against me and a bird tweet in the forest. Despite the somber nature of the site, there was no denying its inherent beauty and majestic quality.
After Kaddish, I spent time walking in the beautiful forest surrounding the memorial site thinking about history and my family’s past. What began as sadness for the loss of my family, transformed into a sense of completeness. By being in Maniewicze, I was continuing my family’s Jewish tradition, that thing that the Nazis worked so hard to destroy. It was a moment of redemption and fulfillment.
My grandfather’s life has been defined by this sense of redemption. He was born in another century, on another continent, and in a small Jewish world that no longer exists. He lost his entire family by the age of 20, but still maintained the will to live. For years after the war, he lived in poverty in a German displacement camp before immigrating to the United States in 1951. Now he is a retired New York City public school teacher with 4 children, 7 grandchildren, and a beautiful home in New Rochelle.
When I look at him, I see both my family’s past and our future. My grandfather has kept alive within him both the lives of the loved ones he lost, but also the eternal spirit of the Jewish People. To be a Jew means to remember. My grandfather has never forgotten his home in Maniewicze or where he came from, despite all the pain it has caused him.
My children will be among the first generation of American Jews to be born without hearing the stories of the Holocaust from actual survivors. Even in my generation there is a tendency to become detached from our grandparents’ stories or the towns they used to call home. We have new identities on our college campuses, drive our parents’ cars, and hardly recognize the languages our ancestors used to speak. Returning to my grandfather’s birthplace took me out of this bubble of American Jewish life. I was reconnected with roots I never knew I had. Now I have the power to tell my grandfather’s story as he told me. Now, I have uncovered my past.
Wherever we go in the world, there is an unseen and unspoken past beneath the reality we see. In Ukraine, the Jewish past is at the same time horrifically absent, yet present. Jewish culture has been buried by decades of neglect, Soviet rule, and anti-Semitism. Yet, you can feel what was lost in the hearts of the Ukrainian people and the small towns they still live in. As long as there are people eager to search for it, the lives, homes, and stories of the Jews of Western Ukraine will never die.
Jonathan Kamel is a student at Northwestern University.
