CHAPTER EIGHT
June 5–16, 1919
On Thursday morning, June 5, 1919, the second day of Shavuot, the day of Pentecost, gunfire erupted on the road leading to the nearby town of Tarashcha. The bandit leaders Zhelezniak, Yatsenko, and Voytsekovsky, underlings from Ataman Nikifor Grigoriev’s unit, burst into Stavishche on horseback with a five-thousand-man unit looking to wreak havoc upon its Jewish population, which numbered roughly four and a half thousand people. Eyewitnesses stated that this group declared themselves to be “White-Guards.”I
Yunkel and Esther Cutler’s oldest son, nine-year-old Daniel Cutler, was in town with an elderly Jewish friend when the two heard the commotion of four drunken peasants in the street. The boisterous gang became separated from the thousands of other bandits who were making their way toward the synagogue. Daniel and the older gentleman quickly took shelter under a stairwell, but peasants encircled another elderly Jewish man, who hadn’t managed to take cover. They laughed, amused by his terrified expression as they aimed a gun at his head.
“Dance, Jew, dance!” the peasants drunkenly demanded him.
The old man, with a gun cocked at his head, obeyed.
“Dance faster, Jew, faster!” another peasant yelled out.
The old man began to dance even faster.
“You’re not dancing fast enough, old Jew!”
The old man tried his hardest to keep up, but instead collapsed. One of the drunkards brought over a hot iron that he had stolen from a nearby blacksmith shop. He motioned for the others to force open the hand of the petrified man. “This is for you, Jew!” the peasant laughed. As the compression of the hot iron caused his palm to sizzle, the man let out a curdling yell.
Daniel’s friend, who had been hiding with him under the stairwell, risked their safety when he lifted his head to observe. The peasant wielding the weapon spotted him and fired a fatal gunshot between his eyes.
The sight of an old Jewish woman running out into the street soon diverted the peasants’ attention away from the stairwell, where Daniel, frozen with fear, remained alone in hiding. The intoxicated peasants surrounded the woman, who had left her house to see the cause of the commotion. They encircled her, ripping at her clothes. As she screamed for help, each peasant took a turn raping her. During the assault, the old Jewish man, whom they had just burned and tortured, rallied to come to her aid, lifting his battered body off the ground while desperately trying to reach her. In response, one of the murderers fired a final shot at him.
Petrified by the sight of his friend’s bloody, lifeless body sprawled out next to him on the ground and fearful for his own life, Daniel waited for the cover of darkness before running home to safety.
The boy first fled to the nearby shoe factory of Isaac Caprove, where he frantically pounded on his stunned aunt and uncle’s door. He recounted the horror that he witnessed. “Bandits are here!” Daniel screamed to Rebecca and Isaac, referring to the large group of sikrikim or sikriks.II
Daniel ran home and warned everyone that the town was under siege. The boy had witnessed the first two casualties of what was just the beginning of a long and treacherous pogrom. Isaac and Rebecca wrongly assumed it was an isolated incident.
The next afternoon, when Isaac went to synagogue, he was stunned to discover that the town was still under attack. Arriving at the temple, he was grabbed at gunpoint and taken hostage with those who had gathered the day before to celebrate Shavuot. Throughout the day, the three top henchmen of Grigoriev, with Zhelezniak clearly in charge, herded dozens of Jews who entered the building until there was standing room only. Zhelezniak’s men waved their guns and surrounded the hostages inside of the synagogue. Over and over again the bandits shouted in Russian, “Jews are Communists!”
The Jewish men in the room knew that there were no Communists among them. After a meeting with a group of peasants from the nearby village of Pshienka, Zhelezniak announced to his hostages that it was decided that instead of killing everyone, they would allow the Jews from Stavishche to buy their freedom by paying a ransom.III
Isaac watched as his rabbi, Pitsie Avram, was ordered to collect a contribution of 400,000 rubles from the Jews of the town, along with eight hundred measures of cloth and six hundred sets of underwear. The rabbi, clutching his uneven white beard in amazement, studied the familiar faces of some of his captors and could not believe his eyes. He, along with other witnesses, recognized these bandits as some of the local priests, landowners, students, teachers, and peasants.IV The rabbi knew the deacon of one of the nearby villages who stood up and announced that he would take it upon himself the “good deed” of revenge on the Jews.V
The brilliant rabbi was forced at gunpoint to knock door to door and request from his followers: “Give me your rubles and your underwear.” With the assistance of several well-respected men from Stavishche, however, the rabbi was successful in collecting a considerable sum.
At the end of the day, Pitsie Avram and his assistants returned to the shul where Isaac and the other hostages witnessed their esteemed rabbi handing over 357,000 rubles to Zhelezniak. When Pitsie Avram remarked to Zhelezniak that the money was taken from poor people, the ataman “showed mercy and handed back seven-thousand.”VI
The rabbi, however, was unable to meet all of the captors’ demands. While he was successful in collecting most of the ransom, finding cloth and underwear in such large quantities, especially since undergarments were not yet mass-produced in Russia, was an impossible task. Zhelezniak’s men, who were drunk and out of control, meted revenge on a handful of Jews. In addition to the two victims whose brutal deaths were witnessed by Daniel Cutler, several others were slaughtered in town.
The rabbi and his men reported to those being held captive in the shul that Isaac’s thirty-year-old neighbor, Phillip “Yitzhak” Kohen, had been killed. Phillip’s brother-in-law Israel Senderowitz, standing with Isaac, heard the news first-hand: Phillip, a new father, was shot by a drunken bandit as he lay sleeping in his bed.VII
The men, including Isaac, who had been imprisoned inside the synagogue, were eventually released. Israel Senderowitz and Isaac were among the last hostages to leave. Zhelezniak admitted that he was unable to restrain his men. The bandit leader gave Senderowitz money to distribute among those Jewish families in Stavishche who had lost their loved ones, with several thousand rubles to be given to Israel’s newly widowed sister, Chaika, and her baby daughter, Bella.
Two Days Later: Shabbat, June 7, 1919
The gang returned to town once more. They tortured and raped many women and injured more than eighty Jews, including young children, slashing at them with their swords. They ransacked Jewish houses and loaded 180 wagons with all kinds of goods, such as food, clothing, large pieces of furniture, draperies, goose-down pillows, bed linens, dishes, silverware, Shabbat candlesticks, and jewelry. They also helped themselves to two and a half dozen heads of cattle, horses, and wagons.
The townspeople quietly spoke about the atrocities inflicted upon their friends and neighbors. Three old women told of the unthinkable torture of a thirteen-year-old fatherless girl whose family was named Wilfond after having witnessed it from a nearby room in their house. The teenager was dragged into a wooden structure and then raped and beaten. During the attack, the old women overheard the girl’s assailants threatening to kill her if she screamed. After the bandits fled, the women ran to help her, but they found her suffering from serious injuries and were shocked to see that her beautiful brown hair had turned white. She died a short time later in their presence.VIII
For Isaac, there was more bad news. When he heard rumors that two of his acquaintances, Hirsh Zagatovtchik, another shoemaker in town, and Motel Tsirolnick, had been murdered, Isaac sought out Rabbi Pitsie Avram for more information. The rabbi confirmed what others had reported to him. Bandits burst into Hirsh Zagatovtchik’s home, relentlessly chasing him and trapping him in his courtyard. He turned over all the money that he had hidden to his pursuers, and then escaped while they were counting it. On Bathhouse Street, the murderers caught up with him. They slashed a bayonet through Hirsh’s head, but he was strong as an ox and did not die quickly. Three more assassins beat him to death using the butts of their rifles.IX
“What happened to Motel?” Isaac asked Pitsie Avram.
The rabbi told him that a Christian neighbor of Motel’s reported to a group of local bandits that Tsirolnick made a negative comment about the Ataman Zhelezniak. To make a personal example of Motel, Zhelezniak responded to the insult by hunting him down. The hetman then killed Motel by shooting him in the mouth.X
Isaac, devastated, returned home to his wife and daughters, who were still in shock after hearing about the Wilfond girl’s murder.
During the week Zhelezniak’s men occupied the town, they forced their way into Zaslawsky’s printer’s shop. The establishment on the hill was owned by the wealthiest man in town, whose son, David, was married to Rabbi Pitsie Avram’s youngest daughter, Havah. After breaking into the shop, bandits printed large anti-Semitic posters filled with poisonous lies about the Jews.
When the gang finally departed for Tarashcha, the Jews had no way of anticipating that the Red Army would inadvertently drive these killers back to Stavishche. Their most lethal raid caught everyone by surprise on the evening of June 15–16, 1919, when locals brutally assisted Zhelezniak’s mob in the attacks.
The two factions terrorizing the Jews of Stavishche clearly defined themselves by the weapons they chose to brutalize their victims with. Zhelezniak’s pogromchiks armed themselves with guns, rifles, and bayonets. Local peasant thugs who joined in the bloodbath attacked with farming tools, such as axes and pitchforks. Together they began by storming the street near the Stavishcha Inn, where Isaac, Rebecca, and their young daughters resided. They wildly smashed windows, axed down doors, and brutally murdered those not in hiding.
Isaac and Rebecca’s House: The Next Morning, June 16, 1919
From every corner the neighborhood was coming out of hiding, hugging and crying or screaming next to the victims of the pogrom. Rebecca and Isaac, who crawled out of the root cellar as soon as the violence stopped, ran quickly to their house. They opened the back door, which was still closed and intact, and rushed to their daughters’ bed.
Their legs froze in place, preparing for the worst. Rebecca felt an awful pit in her stomach, afraid of what horrible scene they might find. Instead, they found the girls safe in their bed; they slept through the night!
The violent mob passed over their house!
Rebecca looked at her husband. His cheeks had gone white. Hands shaking, he picked up Sunny, who stretched and smiled. Rebecca broke down and sobbed uncontrollably into Channa’s long, brown hair. Confused, the girls looked around with wide eyes. The children, unintentionally left alone in their bed as their worried parents feared for their lives, were oblivious to what had happened.
“Nothing—nothing touched,” Isaac said, wondering. “Why did they spare us?”
“Isaac!” a howl came from outside the front door, followed by loud banging. “Isaac! Isaac Caprove! Your peasant Vasyl has murdered my wife!”
Isaac, visibly shaken and still damp from the root cellar where he had just spent a harrowing night in hiding while separated from his daughters, waited for the pounding to stop. He took a few minutes to compose himself before carrying Sunny with him to open the door.
Outside on the street, in front of his shoe factory, a couple dozen Jewish men and women congregated, distraught and still terrified.
Rebecca followed, her oldest daughter huddled against her leg. Channa heard the group of men talking, too many of them at once. Their voices were low and urgent.
“Itsie Shadken was shot in the leg! They took him to Count Branicki’s hospital but he died on the way. He bled to death!”
“That handsome student? He should never have come home for the summer!”
“I heard that Mordechai Gutharts was murdered. Isn’t he the young man who headed the Committee for the Poor?”
“They killed Chaim Mayer’s stepson, Asher!”
“Who did this horror?”
“Zhelezniak and his thugs came back!”
“Vasyl and his local gang joined Zhelezniak’s men. He led the raid down our street!”
“Yes, it was Vasyl!” another man told Isaac. “I was hiding under the stairwell of the inn. I heard him—it was your apprentice”—he sneered at Isaac—“leading those drunken Ukrainians, egging them on, then yelling at them to leave your house alone. He stopped the murderers from hacking down your door. He wouldn’t allow anyone to enter your house!” The man gestured to Isaac’s front door, which was still intact, and his factory window, the only unbroken one on the block.
Channa listened in shock. She knew Vasyl well: he worked for her father. She often played with his little girl. Isaac had met him a couple of years before at the town yarid (market). Vasyl had been caught stealing peaches and apricots from the stand of a Jewish peddler. An angry crowd surrounded the peasant when Isaac noticed the young daughter who was with him: she was about Channa’s age. Starving, the girl was devouring a peach that her father had stolen. Isaac felt sorry for her, so he stepped in and paid the merchant for Vasyl’s stolen fruit and demanded that the growing crowd of onlookers disperse. Believing that every man should have the chance to earn an honest living to feed his family, Ivan offered the peasant a job in his one-room shoe factory resulting in Vasyl learning the shoemaking trade and remaining a loyal employee.
Vasyl always said that Isaac was the only Jew in Stavishche to ever show him kindness. He promised Isaac that one day he would return the kindness that he had shown him. That’s why Channa and Sunny weren’t murdered in their beds.
“Isaac Caprove, you took in a murderer,” an older man spat. “My wife is dead because of Vasyl, that troublemaker… thief… murderer! He kept those thugs from harming you!”
Isaac’s eyes flashed. “Would you blame me for that peasant’s murderous ways? Do you really resent me for still having my wife and children alive? My girls were sleeping in that house!”
“If only we had known,” Rebecca wept, dropping to her knees. “We would have had everyone hiding in our home.” The men who had been arguing all turned toward her; the sight of the beautiful, pregnant twenty-seven-year-old brunette on the ground shaking and crying helped to break the mounting tension around her.
“Rebecca,” Isaac reached out to her, in a comforting tone. Channa saw the love and despair in her father’s face.
Channa recognized the newly widowed merchant as he raised his voice. “What will we do? Nearly thirty of us are dead; so many are hurt. Our women were beaten and raped in their own homes. Our houses are in shambles. We’re not safe!”
“We can’t turn on each other,” Isaac said.
“You won’t be so safe next time!” the elderly man responded. “I’m taking what’s left of my family to Belaya Tserkov.”
“Volodarka!” another said. “The rabbi is heading there.”
The murmurs grew. Channa felt her mother tighten her grip against her. “Belaya Tserkov,” Rebecca said. Her sister Molly and brother Shalum lived there; she felt they’d be safer in the larger city.
First Escape from Stavishche
“Belaya Tserkov,” Rebecca kept insisting to Isaac, as she grabbed what she could in a panic. She gathered her jewelry and whatever clothing and food that she could carry. She knew that her husband was torn. Isaac was contemplating fleeing to Volodarka, a village only fifteen miles away, in nearby Skvira district, whereas Belaya Tserkov was twenty-nine miles north. But she was insistent.
Isaac closed the door to the house gently behind him, and, with a sigh, the family began walking swiftly to Belaya Tserkov, ears alert for the sounds of returning thugs. Nearly eight hundred Jews filled the cobblestone and dusty dirt Stavishche streets, carrying their belongings, their eyes weary and grief-stricken. They were leaving the only home many had known. Children with runny noses held their parents’ hands.
“Channa, you will carry the bread,” Rebecca instructed. The little girl obeyed, and followed her mother, father, and sister on foot, holding the long loaf.
Sunny, a toddler, complained constantly that she was tired. It would be a whole day and night’s walk on foot. Isaac had to carry her, but it was no easy task: she was a hefty little thing. As the long line of people reached the crossroads at the edge of town, Channa saw a smaller group with Rabbi Pitsie Avram walking in a slightly different direction, northwest toward Volodarka. The newlyweds Rachel and Elias, who hid during the night with Rebecca and Isaac in the root cellar, held hands as they followed the rabbi’s procession.
Next to Pitsie Avram, Channa eyed his grandson Laizer, a thin, handsome boy her age. Laizer didn’t smile, but he waved to her. Channa noticed that he, too, was carrying a large loaf of bread.
After what felt like a week of walking, Isaac led his hungry family off the main thoroughfare to a dirt wagon-rutted road and across a field to a small peasant’s hut. “We can’t make it on foot. We need food. I know this man,” he said. “Rebecca, give me your locket and your ring.” Isaac returned with a local peasant who agreed to transport the family north on his old horse and wagon, which were kept behind a barn.
Isaac silently held out three dirty potatoes. Rebecca used her skirt to wipe the dirt off the potatoes and handed one to each girl. “Eat everything, even the skin,” she said. “It would be sinful to waste it.”
Lying in the wagon under a musty burlap cover, Channa took a bite of the gritty, metallic-tasting spud. Her teeth and tongue rebelled, but she followed her mother’s instructions. She was so hungry that the potato was gone almost immediately. As the horse clopped on and on, Channa and Sunny fell asleep.
Pitsie Avram’s small flock veered off the main road and crossed the wooden bridge built over the Ros River leading to Volodarka. Unbeknownst to the rabbi’s group, the bandits, after looting many of the homes that were abandoned by Jews in Stavishche, also headed in that direction, much to the horror of those who just fled from them. After Zhelezniak’s men arrived on their heels, they demanded that all the Jews from Stavishche be handed over to their hetman.
The attention of the thugs soon shifted.
“The Reds are coming—burn the bridge!” one of their leaders yelled.
Bandits lit torches and set fire to the old, wooden bridge, keeping out the (Regional) Red Army that were pursuing them on horses from Tarashcha. In doing so, they trapped the Jews of Stavishche in Volodarka with no way to return home.
Once again Rabbi Pitsie Avram went over to privately negotiate with Zhelezniak, who showed great respect for the gutsy, revered rabbi.
“Bring out boards for a makeshift bridge!” Zhelezniak ordered the locals, who obeyed by layering sheets of wood over the shallow part of the river, allowing the Jews to return to Stavishche.
Pitsie Avram waited by the edge of the Ros River until all his people crossed over safely. The rabbi was such a brave, charismatic, and effective negotiator that he even managed to convince Zhelezniak to give the small group of frazzled Jews bread to eat during their long journey home.
Among those returning with this group was the rabbi’s seven-year-old grandson, Channa’s neighborhood friend Laizer Spector, the child of Pitsie Avram’s daughter Libby.XI A few days afterward, the Jews who returned to Stavishche from Volodarka selected a day to fast as a remembrance for their neighbors slain by Zhelezniak’s gang.XII
Isaac, Rebecca, and their young daughters narrowly escaped with their lives by fleeing with the larger group farther north to Belaya Tserkov (Russian for “White Church”). The following day, as the exhausted refugees entered the city full of white domes and cathedrals, they could not help but be reminded of the negative attitude that they felt the Church had toward them as Jews. Isaac’s heart sunk, fearing that he’d supported the wrong choice and led his family deeper into danger. Under her breath, however, Rebecca was quietly relieved: they had finally arrived safely in Shvartse Tume.XIII