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My Relatives in Kosov
Part 4
Alex in his inimitable style called out to the occupants who slowly came out and he then explained why we
were there. They were hesitant at first, but then invited us to come in through the back door. They
spoke in broken Polish, but Mom had picked that up within the two days we'd been there. At the door, Mom
stopped suddenly, then asked if she could enter through the front door since that was how she did it when she
would visit Chaim. Before she could re-enter, the Ukrainian man who owned the house said that he knew for sure
this was a "Jewish" home. It hardly registered with her because the moment she entered the
small hallway which led to each of the 2 apartments, she let out a scream that I had never heard come from her
lungs. She almost forced her way into their living room and said, "Ethan, it's the same furniture just as
Dvora (Chaim's wife) had it arranged." She even recognized Chaim's Singer sewing machine that stood in
the corner. She didn't want to leave. I could tell she was torn between thanking these somewhat
hospitable people, and telling them the place wasn't really theirs. Luckily she settled on the former.
Finally, Alex and I forced her to leave, but not before we took many pictures.
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Chaim's house. (click on photo for a larger view) |
After this early afternoon victory, we were feeling emboldened and decided to tackle finding the
Woloshtchuks, the family who saved my mother and her brother Nissan along with his wife and 2 children, none
of whom actually made it out of Kosiv.
Alex took us over to the post office and told me there were about 10 such families living in Kosiv, it
being a somewhat common name. Mom could not recall whether she crossed the Ribnetze River when she was
running from the Gestapo after they found her hiding in her uncle's house. Thus, we did not really know
whether to look near the Zarynek River or near Chaim's house. BTW, one phenomenon that developed along the way
is that Mom would out of nowhere tell Alex to stop the car and she would run out and dart down an alleyway
that looked familiar running her hands against the pockmarked walls as if to ask them to help her remember.
She would also blurt things out like "Fafluchte Yuden", roughly "Dirty Jew", which is what
the Gestapo were screaming at her as she fled. Alex noted that there was a Woloshtchuk family not so far from
Chaim's house and that we should try to see if they were home. What should have been a 10 minute drive turned
into 30 since all roads are dirt except for the town square and no streets are marked. We finally located the
home and Alex, as he usually did, called out to them from the fence, an old woman using 2 canes, coming out to
greet us. She invited us in and Mom screamed, "This is it! Ethan this is how I was hidden, the barn right
in back of the house, same size, same everything." Alex immediately engaged the son and his crippled
mother in a lengthy conversation as I inspected the barn. It couldn't have been more than 10' x 20', just big
enough to house 2 or 3 milk cows.
Mom walked into the barn and said, "He used to come in here and make believe he was feeding the cows
and would rap on the ceiling and Nissan would lift up the floorboard and pull the pail with food up on a rope
he had and would lower it down in the morning." I said, "How the hell did you all get up
there?" She took me out of the barn and said, "Look!" In the back was a high door right below
the gable inaccessible except for by ladder, probably used to store hay. I asked the woman's son if I could
borrow his ladder and slowly climbed up to the door that easily swung wide open. I was shaken by what I saw:
slightly bigger than a crawl space, but hardly an attic the way you'd think of it. It had wooden floor
boards covered by hay, two burlap mattresses stuffed with hay and not much else.
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The "attic" in the barn. (Click on photo to see a larger
view, which will open in a new window.) |
I looked down at Mom and she said without seeing it, "It was my home for three
years, no standing, no talking... My spot was the upper right-hand corner." I imagined 7 people (2 others
were hidden with them) trapped up there for the better part of 3 years, surviving on potato peels and water,
unable to grieve for their family members already murdered, hiding just because it was OK to kill Jews out in
the open. I descended quickly and walked to the back side of the barn and proceeded to wipe the tears from my
eyes as fast as I could. What an awful price we pay for being Jewish.
This paradigm of constantly testing us through flood, destruction, exile, Holocaust, and intifadah has
taken its toll. Alex approached eventually and said, "It may look like the barn, but it's not the
one." He explained that the old woman had no reason to lie, and anyway he could tell if she was, and that
he believed her that they hid no Jews during the War. A former historian, Alex is tough that way, not jumping
to conclusions even though you desperately want him to. There would be other Woloshtchuks in the days to come
and, though we came close, we never seemed to hit the nail on the head. Our only success was eventually
learning Mr. Woloshtchuk's first name, from a non-Jew in Kuty (the next town from Kosiv).
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