Chapter 30.
As the summer of 1939 approached its end, Czernovitz, my hometown in the North-Eastern corner of Romania looked like a peaceful place, a placid university town, where streets, buildings and parks would come alive with the influx of students, who would register for the new school year 1939-40.
However, the end of August brought ominous news, renewed demands from Adolf Hitler, that loud-mouthed history shaper and shaker from Germany. The signing of a nonaggression pact between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union on August 22 changed the general outlook of the situation. To see pictures of von Ribbentrop and Molotov, the foreign ministers of Germany and the Soviet Union, signing a pact and shaking hands, all this presented Europeans and, probably, the rest of the world, with grotesque images. Do the sheep and the wolf really eat at the same table? Do they drink from the same cup, sleep in the same bed? Nationalism and internationalism - united by deceitful signatures and seemingly friendly handshakes. We had seen deceit by Fascists and Communists before, but what was that a harbinger of? Nobody, at the time, had an intimation of the underhandedness of both giant dictators, of Hitler and Stalin. Each one of them deemed that he had got the upper hand, considered that he had outsmarted the other. Both had decided to divide Europe among themselves; of course Stalin would have an almost free hand in Eastern Europe.
The hell with the West, the hell with the people of Eastern Europe, who had been bargained away between Germany and the Soviet Union.
Thus, in August of 1939, I surely did not know that my life had been planned for me by Hitler and Stalin. Our province had been doomed to become a Southwestern nook in the Soviet Union, a provincial backwater in a giant conglomerate of supposedly friendly Soviet nations.
At the end of August, life went on with its usual rhythms, and the unusual ones would come uninvited. At home, Mother made preparations for the impending fall and winter seasons; she prepared jams and jellies, bought cloth and lining for new winter coats for herself and me; Father made sure to reserve seats in the synagogue for the approaching fall holidays of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. I had to register for my second year at the university, my friend got ready to leave for Bucharest, where he would complete his sixth and last year in Medical School.
All these activities were overshadowed by the ultimatum tendered by Germany to Poland in the last days of August. The pretext for attacking the Eastern neighbor consisted of a demand to cede Danzig and the Corridor. To-day this port is known to the world by its Polish name Gdansk, with its shipyard and the birth of the labor union Solidarity. Hitler saw his country as a maritime power on the Baltic Sea and coveted this gem of a port and the approaches to it.
All summer, while my friends and myself tried to enjoy a normal vacation - going on hikes, basking in the sun, swimming in the Prut, normalcy was a far cry from reality. The specter of war, a feeling of doom kept creeping into our lives. Yet, we went through the mechanics of living and loving, of growing up and endeavoring not to grow weary, for we still had our youth.
At the age of 13, I became aware of a demonic leader who intruded into everyday life through the medium of radio. From the time Hitler came to power in 1933, all our lives changed. Radio was a more immediate presence in my life than the daily newspaper. When reading, one can keep one’s composure much better than when listening to hysterical harangues. Since every radio station in Europe could be heard at any time, Hitler’s voice was on almost every evening on German radio stations, to the horror of all listeners. Since we were German speaking, we were not spared any of his boisterous speeches and the response of the German public, which was wildly enthusiastic. History was made on the radio the way it is often made nowadays on television.
On the first of September, 1939, on a sunny, clear, crisp Friday, the world was awaiting Poland’s answer to Germany’s ultimatum. As much as I was inclined to be optimistic - namely, that war would not break out, no Polish answer could have been a good answer. There was no good alternative. Had Poland ceded the demanded territory, Hitler could have occupied all of Poland, just as he had previously done in Czechoslovakia and we would have the Germans on the border. No good. If Poland refused, which it did, then Hitler would attack and invade Poland and war would break out. In my own mind there was no good alternative, no good answer in the situation.
Thus, when I said good-bye to my boy friend, we knew that between then and Christmas vacation lay a great unknown, possibly a great impending tragedy. The world around us felt like a globe rolling downhill and no way to stop it.
In the middle of the day, about noon, the radio announced Poland’s proclamation denying Germany’s ultimatum. Hitler had prepared some provocation on the German-Polish border, wherein they faked an attack by Poles against Germans. Hitler wanted to make sure that the war broke out on that day, September 1.
When I think of it now, 50 years later, it reminds me of the fact that our younger generation often ask: "Where were you when you heard that President Kennedy was shot?" People of my generation think of September 1, 1939 and ask one another this same question. Of course, my generation also asks: "Where were you during the war?" and "Where were you at the end of the war?"
That day changed the history of the 20th century, that day changed everybody’s life in Europe, it changed all of Europe, it also brought about Pearl Harbor and the involvement of the United States in the World War. It was a watershed in history, a point where we think of "before" and "after." The 50 million people, who lost their lives and had their fate sealed on that day. Our Jewish people were almost wiped out in Europe and the ones, like my parents and myself, who survived, fought desperately to keep alive. This World War invented the obscenity of genocide on a grand scale and the horror that was Auschwitz.
How fortunate that people don’t exactly know what they are about to confront, for they would not dare go through it. My own life could never have turned out the way it did, if not for the war. After all, who could image one’s life in a ghetto, living under the Romanians, the Soviets, German-Romanian occupation, the return of the Soviets, during the worst days of Stalin’ terror, and towards the end of the war as a refugee in Romania, later in Israel and in the United States. How unstable a time, how bereft of home and friends, how tossed by historic circumstances, how deprived of any security, how defenseless against the turmoil of history.
In a world not of one’s own making or of one’s own choosing, here I am 50 years later, looking back with very tempered gladness. Some underlying sadness never left me, the times of despair and deprivation branded me with an indelible stamp of tragic experience.
Some survivors rarely think of those years, rarely talk of the daily life of long ago, yet the immediacy of those historic events never left me. Hitlerism and Stalinism, Nazism and Communism played an enormous part in my life. They decided its course, they robbed me of everything, except my parents. They took my belief in the decency of people. What Nazi Germany was capable of I knew, yet I never thought that the Soviet Union would turn out to be one enormous prison. Thus, I became a refugee like most other survivors and the turning point was September 1, 1939. For me, that day will live in infamy, to paraphrase a famous American president.