*
The youth groups all organized summer activities. In August 1939, young Labor Zionists gathered at camps and symposia where they danced and sang, studied and read, played sports, slept outdoors, and led countless seminars. They discussed the recent British white paper that had limited Jewish immigration to Palestine, and considered ways to relocate, desperate to carry on the work of their collective ideals, to save the world. The summer programs ended, and on September 1, the members were just settling back at home, undergoing the transition between the chosen family and the birth one, summer and school, green and ocher, warm breeze and chill, the country and the city.
Also, that was the day Hitler invaded Poland.
Chapter 2
From the Fire, to the Fire
Renia
SEPTEMBER 1939
Rumors flew like shots. The Nazis were burning, looting, gouging eyes, cutting tongues, murdering babies, slicing off women’s breasts. Renia didn’t know what to think, but like everyone in town, she knew that the Germans were coming to J?drzejów. She knew they were after the Jews. Dust clouded over families, tornados of panic. No one knew where to go. Houses were shuttered. Bags were packed. Walking en masse town to town, civilians and their children stepped alongside retreating columns of Polish soldiers. There were no trains.
Along with many of their neighbors, the Kukielkas decided to head east to Chmielnik, a similarly small town on the other side of the Nida River, where they hoped they would be beyond the Germans’ reach, and where they believed the Polish army still held strong. The Kukielkas had relatives in Chmielnik. They took nothing with them. Joining the throngs, they set off by foot.
The twenty-one-mile road was littered with the corpses of people and cattle—all casualties of the Nazis’ relentless air attacks. German planes dropped explosives on all sides. Renia, suffocated by the rancid smell, often found herself knocked off her feet, limbs splayed wide, to a backdrop of burning villages. It was safer, she learned quickly, to stay put as the bombs fell; stillness was a shield. Another blast, then a plane flew low and peppered the air with machine-gun bullets. Their whistle was all she could hear—that and the babies. Mothers clutched children into their bodies but were killed, going limp, leaving surviving infants and toddlers shrieking “to the skies,” she later described. A day and night of hell to reach Chmielnik.
But Renia could tell right away, Chmielnik was no safe haven. The town was a collection of rubble from which scorched, half-alive people were being dragged. And those were the lucky ones. People from here, it turned out, had fled to J?drzejów, hoping for safety there. “Everyone was trying to escape from the frying pan into the fire.”
Chmielnik sizzled with anticipated violence. Rumors from back home were nightmarishly vivid: Nazis had taken over J?drzejów, were firing indiscriminately, and had rounded up and shot ten Jewish men in the town square, the brightly colored, bustling center of their lives. This act was meant as a warning to the local Jews, demonstrating what would happen if anyone disobeyed them. Chmielniks knew that they were next.
At that point, it was believed that, as in all past wars, only the men were in danger, not women and children. Many Jewish males, including Renia’s father, Moshe, fled town toward the Bug River, where the Soviets had advanced, and they hoped to find protection hiding in the countryside. Renia later wrote that the women’s screams during the separation from their men were simply unbearable. One can only imagine the terror she felt, letting go of her beloved Dad, for who knows how long, to where, to what.
Chmielnik’s wealthy, Renia heard, had rented horses and fled to Russia. Houses stood empty.
Not surprising, but still horrifying, their time came. One night Renia was able to see the German tanks from afar. She recorded with pride that from the whole town, only one Jewish boy was brave enough to confront them. He ran out firing a gun, but Nazi bullets sliced him to shards. Within ten minutes, Renia wrote, the Nazis were strolling through town, entering houses and restaurants, looting food, grabbing rags for washing their horses. They took whatever they wanted.