Reviews of Here My Home Once Stood

I am very happy to be getting some favorable reviews. A few people have made positive comments on Amazon. The latest is from Kirkus Discoveries:

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A gripping tale that traces the unlikely survival of a Ukrainian teen during the Holocaust.

The atrocities of the Holocaust have provided the backdrop for many books and films, but few are as detailed and harrowing as Rekhtman’s stomach-churning account. Transcribed and translated from Russian by his grandson, this slim volume serves as the only record left of an entire Ukrainian village wiped out in 1942. While such a scenario often leads to heavy-handed sentimentalities and overwrought emotions, the author resorts to very few of those elements. Instead, readers are served a clear-eyed retelling of the cruelty and inhumanity that reigned during World War II. The story opens with a description of the secluded village of Kalyus, where Rekhtman was born and few of its 850 residents ever left. At 14, Rekhtman experienced a peaceful existence in which Jews and Ukrainians lived and worked together. Of course, this reality changed quickly when Communist officials fled during the night and rumors of German brutality toward Jews floated to the town. As the German army advanced into the Ukraine, the author’s neighbors and childhood friends began treating Jews with distrust and hate. A police unit arrived to enforce intense, useless labor such as moving snow from one side of the road to the other, on the Jewish residents. The author was transported to a labor camp where he worked in a stone quarry and became accustomed to constant beatings and starvation. His village was turned into a ghetto enclosed by barbed wire. When it was announced that the Kalyus ghetto was closed and everyone would be transported to another ghetto, none of the villagers realized that they were walking to their deaths until it was too late. Able-bodied people who could work were picked out, including the author’s father, uncle, great-uncle and his two sons. His father refused to leave his family and was shot by rounds of machine guns along with the rest of the village. With quick wit and a huge will to survive, Rekhtman evaded Nazi killing fields and death camps for four years, despite failing eyesight and an emaciated body. This story holds no bitterness or outrage but reveals the unfathomable strength of the human spirit.

A well-crafted, touching account of horror and fortitude.

Here My Home Stood - Now Available

I am sorry I have not posted in the last several months. I had been busy putting the final touches on the book.

It is now available on many major sites including Amazon and Barnes & Noble.Any proceeds from this book, and I am sure there will be little, will go to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.


This book is the result of three years of audio recording by my grandfather an an additional three years of translation and writing by me. It was both emotionally and physically draining, but worth every minute I had spent with it. My grandfather is my hero and bringing his story to print is a realization of a lifelong dream for me.

Thank you for your support. I hope you buy it. If you find it too expensive, please e-mail. I want it to be available to all who care to read it.

Much love,
Phil

Prologue

Each of us knows him in our own intimate and vastly different way. To my mother, he was a strict father, unyielding when it came to curfews, academics, and discipline. He was a young father, lanky and impossibly thin. He loved to read and was known to lift the books others were reading and lock himself in the bathroom with them for hours. He had so many volumes a curious toddler grandchild would later ask him why he had so many copies of the same book.

To me, he is a loving grandfather and, in many ways, my best friend. He taught me to read, play chess, and ride a bike. He was the one I could always count on during a turbulent childhood. He was there for the long and confusing trek from the Soviet Union to the United States via Austria and Italy. He walked me to school long after I stopped needing an escort, turning back a few blocks short to spare an insecure high-school sophomore any undue embarrassment. That was the last year his sight allowed him to walk by himself, and he must have known it. If he did know, he made no fuss about it. He simply gave me a kiss, turned around, and walked home each day, considering himself exceedingly fortunate.

The next generation sees him much differently, and he sees it not at all. To his great-grandchildren, he is a figure only able to give love, a lot of love. He has given himself to his family for many years and now he is frail. His mind is sharp, but his eyes have been eaten away by time, illness, and hardships few can fathom. His youngest great-grandchild, my son, lives three thousand miles away from him and sees his diedushka only two or three times a year. Yet this aged patriarch has a profound impact on my son. There is something surreal about the way the toddler loves this hulking figure who seldom gets up from his armchair. They have a bond, as all of us do, that only an unbroken link from so far away and so long ago can explain. The tot zooms by as his great-grandfather tries to hug him, arms flailing helplessly but without panic or frustration. To the little one, it’s a game. He may run past his grandfather many times but there will always be the embrace and kiss at the end. He won’t do it right there and then, but my son will talk about his love for his grandfather later. Back home he will ask me to call him and greet grandpa’s excited voice with the same words we all speak to him “Ya tebia lublu, dieda”—I love you, grandfather.

There is this Moyshe Rekhtman, weathered and sightless, loving and patient. There was the Moyshe of the long walks to school, the one who taught the letters and the chessmen’s moves. There was the young Moyshe who struggled to raise two daughters in the impoverished postwar Soviet Union, the one who stayed with his youngest daughter in the crumbling USSR as the rest of the family moved to New York in the late 1970s.

But before this Moyshe Rekhtman, there was another one. There was the one who refused to die in the Nazi killing fields of the Ukraine. Everything he was, everything he is, everything we are, and everything we will become was forged in those blood-soaked years when a 14-year-old walked out of the valley of death to give us life. And whether we have known his story for many years, as I have, or are yet to learn it, as my son will, our hearts are filled with deep love, sympathy, and admiration for this great man.

Just as sight was escaping Moyshe’s failing eyes, my cousin Alex asked him to tell about everything that had happened to him in those dark war years. Instead of telling his story to one grandson, he decided to tell the story to all the generations that will follow. In 1992, Moyshe felt for the record button on his tape player and recorded the contents of this book in Russian.

I first heard the story in 1995 and it moved me deeply. A few years later, I tried to translate it to English to preserve the memory of my dear grandfather. Alas, working with the noisy cassettes in a tongue growing more foreign to me by the day proved too much for me. It was only in 2003 that I could take to the task in earnest. The technology to digitize my grandfather’s recording had finally arrived. It was then, ten years after my grandfather felt for the stop button, that I gathered the dictionaries and my laptop and finally willed myself to feel for the play button on my iPod. The time has come.

Phil Shpilberg, July 2007

My Village - Kalyus

I want you to know about my family and friends, and about my village, Kalyus, where I passed my short and difficult childhood. Unfortunately, I cannot take you to the place where I was born because, among other reasons, we now live very far from where I once lived. My children and grandchildren will likely never visit the soil where my family history took place. Instead I will tell you everything I remember, so that you will at least have some idea of what happened in those times. I also want you to know where you come from, and who your ancestors were. As the years pass, you will undoubtedly ponder these questions, and nobody will be there to answer them. Much time has gone by, and there are many things that I have forgotten. Yet there are many scraps of memories that remain, and I shall put them together for you.

I was born on November 15th, 1927, in the village of Kalyus, Novoushitski Province, Kamenets- Podolskaya Oblast (Currently called Khmelnitskaya Oblast).

The village lay on the Dniester River, which was, at that time, the natural and political border with Romania’s Bessarabia. Kalyus was far from any railroad stations or major roads, and it seemed to be forgotten by both God and man. It was flanked by mountains on one side, on the other by a pine forest. A small river flowed through the middle of the village, dividing it into two parts. On one side lived the Jewish population, and on the other the Ukrainian people. Ukrainians and Jews lived well together, knew each other by name, studied and worked together, and helped each other in their daily lives. Today, my village no longer exists. In the early 1980s, a hydroelectric station was built on the Dniester River, and the village was submerged under a reservoir. Therefore, no trace of my childhood neighborhood remains.

About 250 families lived in the village, and they were mostly poor. The adults worked on the Jewish collective farm or in the tobacco factory. My father, Shika, and mother, Rachil, worked on the farm until 1939. When a hat factory opened, my father began working as an artisan in the hat-making trade, the craft he had learned as a young man. I was the oldest of three children. My sister Ronya was born in 1934, and my brother, Isaac, in 1940. I can no longer recall their faces, but I have never stopped loving them. My paternal grandparents, Iosif and Mira, were tailors who made new clothes and mended old ones for the Jews and Gentiles of Kalyus and the surrounding villages. They were kind, honest people and were known and liked by Jews and Gentiles alike.

My parents were simple people who earned everything they had with their own toil and sweat. They had no formal education and were illiterate. Their lives were difficult, but they persevered. My mother lost her father at age seven. Her mother, Menya, lived in Luchenets in Vinitskaya Oblast but visited us often. My mother was a gentle, kind person who was compassionate to those around her. She came to live in Kalyus when she married my father. My paternal grandparents loved her as if she were their own child. My father loved her and was deeply devoted to his family. The loving home of my parents is omnipresent in my memories and, even now, I can see their faces and hear their voices.

Of Cruelty and Kindness

Full German authority was established at the end of October 1941. Only then did we wholly comprehend the meaning of the Nazi new world order. The Germans did not rob us; there was nothing left to take. They did, however, double our abuse and humiliation. Now we had both the Germans and the policemen, and the Ukrainian policemen became even crueler to please their German masters. At this time we no longer had a synagogue, and the old Jews gathered in one another’s homes for prayer. The Germans found out about this practice and raided the home where a prayer service was being held. They ordered the old Jews out of the house and commanded them to set the Torah on fire. The devout Jews refused to desecrate our sacred book. They paid dearly for their disobedience; they were shot to death. The Germans set fire to the prayer books themselves. As warning to the rest, the Germans did not allow burial of the dead for two days, fully aware of the Jewish custom to bury our dead right away.

We lived in constant fear and did not know what the next day might bring. When winter started, it brought new hardships. Before the occupation we heated our homes by burning wood and straw. But now we could get neither because we could not leave Kalyus, nobody was permitted to trade with us and we had not money to buy it, and we were cold and starving. People started dying of starvation, pneumonia, and exposure to the cold. The very young and old were the first to die. My brother Isaak became very ill. I do not remember the exact illness but only that he had a very high fever, and my parents were terribly scared. Victor Kulchitsky, our physician’s assistant and the only person with medical training for many kilometers, was not allowed to visit Jewish homes or provide any type of care. My father went to beg him to see the child. Victor had lived in Kalyus for many years. He knew all the Jews by name, had visited every house, and cared for all the children as they grew up. Before the war, I attended school with his son Jeora and, on multiple occasions, had been a guest at the Kulchitsky house. Victor was a good person and despite his fears for the safety of his own family he could not turn sick people away when they needed his help. He came to our house at night and examined Isaak. He shook his head and told my parents that the child needed to go to the hospital. He prepared several medicinal powders and told us he would return to see my brother soon. Victor came a few more times, always late at night, and Isaak got better under his care until the danger completely passed. Victor visited other families too at night. These were heroic acts, because he helped us at great risk and could expect to receive nothing for his kindness other than our gratitude.

Arrival at the Labor Camp

We marched to Novaya Ushitsa under the guard of a police envoy. In the evening we arrived at a Jewish ghetto in the city. Two rows of barbed wire enclosed several streets where the entire Jewish population of the town was forced to live. Policemen guarded the ghetto around the clock. Jewish policemen, who were assigned by the Ukrainian authorities, kept order inside the ghetto. These Jewish policemen assigned their people to labor and conveyed the orders of the German command to the populace of the ghetto. The ordinary inhabitants of the ghetto told us that the Jews running the ghetto were very cruel to them.

The men guarding us forced us into a large stone shed where we spent the night. The next day a group of young men and women from Zamighov, a neighboring village, were thrown into the shed. Like us, they had no idea where they were being taken next. At the end of our second day in the ghetto, we were taken to a square where local men and women were already awaiting departure. Five trucks drove into the ghetto with twenty policemen, four per truck; they divided us and loaded us onto the trucks. The drivers of the trucks were German. As night fell, we were driven off into the unknown.

We stood so closely huddled together that we could not turn. The night was quiet and warm, and we passed by quiet, sleeping villages. We were not permitted to speak. Each of us was thinking the same thing—where are we being taken? What new torment have the Germans thought up for us?

At some time after midnight the trucks stopped in a field. The guards ordered us to get out. They took us to the bushes in groups and allowed us to relieve ourselves. They then told us to get on the ground. We slept there until the sun came up. At dawn the policemen pushed us back into the trucks, and we rode on.

In the morning the trucks pulled into, and stopped in, some town with a gate and fence made of barbed wire. The guards from inside the gates opened them, ordered us inside, and led us to a large square. We formed into two rows of men and women and waited for the commandant of the camp. The large young German soon appeared carrying a rubber baton. He spoke through an interpreter and announced that we had arrived at a work camp. He told us the rules of the camp. We will receive a number that will replace our name, and we are to carry this number at all times. We must provide this number at once if asked by the commandant, camp guards, and police, or work supervisor. Each day we will rise at six in the morning and report to the square for inspection. From there the guards will take us to work. We must work diligently. Upon completion of the day’s work we will receive a bowl of soup and two hundred and fifty grams of bread at the camp kitchen. Curfew was at ten in the evening, and we must be in our barracks by that time. The men are not allowed to visit the women’s quarters and vice versa. The punishment for violation of any camp rules was twenty-five blows from the commandant’s baton or solitary confinement. Skipping work, not working hard, or breaking any work rules was the strictest offense and would result in being shot to death. Attempted escape resulted in immediate execution by hanging in the middle of the camp, as well as the execution of every tenth person in the escapee’s work brigade. Finally he explained that we would be released at the completion of the work and that the length of our stay was entirely dependent on us. After these and many more threatening declarations he turned us over to the camp police, young Jews armed with sticks.

They handed out small pieces of cardboard with our identification number. They then led us to our sleeping quarters. These were old wooden barracks with no electricity, light, or heat. When we came to our designated space, each of us had to pick a spot on the straw covered floor. The people from Kalyus clung to one another in this frightening new place, and we took comfort in sleeping next to one another. This became our sleeping and living space. We sat on the floor, feeling defeated, tired, and hungry. We ate the food in our bags and talked about our present situation. It is true that we were scared, but we were also curious. We did not know what sort of place this was or what type of work awaited us. We did not even know the name of the town. Finally we decided to walk around the territory of the camp and find out what we could.

This is what we learned during our walk. The camp stood at the site of a former monastery. It was surrounded by tall stone walls on three sides; the forth side consisted of a barbed-wire fence and locked gate. The whole camp was in turn surrounded by two additional rows of barbed wire. The wooden barracks where the camp prisoners lived were built around a stone church. There was a large square in the middle of the camp. A well stood at the side of the square that was closest to the barracks. Big buckets of water flanked the well. Two guards wearing military uniforms were stationed outside the gates. Two towers manned by armed guards overlooked the entire territory of the camp. We feared drawing unnecessary attention and decided to return to our sleeping quarters. I lay down and started thinking about what had happened in the last few months, weeks, and days. The chaos and cruelty of it all caught up to me, and I started to cry. I was very afraid. I was still only a boy.

Work at the Concentration Camp

The returning prisoners questioned us about life outside the camp. They all had families somewhere and were desperate to find out what was happening. We in turn asked them about life in the camp. I found out that the camp was located in the Ukrainian town of Letichev.

The prisoner population numbered about two thousand five hundred Jews from the Kamenets-Podolskaya and Vinitskaya oblasts. Most had been at the camp for a month or less. The work was laying railroad tracks between the towns of Proscurevo and Vinnitsa, a key German supply route, as well as mining and breaking stone in the quarry. The work was difficult, and the guards were abusive. These guards were Lithuanians who had earned a reputation among the camp population for their cruelty. They beat the workers for any reason and often without any reason at all. There was also another group of prisoners who worked inside the camp. They worked in the kitchen, poured water into barrels used for drinking and washing, cleaned the camp, and handled all the work needed to keep the camp running. The work was much easier but getting into this work brigade was impossible, because it consisted entirely of relatives and close friends of the Jews in leadership roles at the camp.

My new comrades advised me to go to sleep as early as possible because the daily wake-up call consisted of screams and blows by the camp police. I would then need to get dressed quickly, run to the well and then take my place in the work-brigade lineup in the square.


The next morning was just as the experienced prisoners had promised. At six in the morning I awoke to screams and stick blows from the camp police. After dressing quickly, I grabbed the rest of the food left from home and ran to the water buckets. There was only time for a quick rinse at the well because of the large crowd gathered there. We then assembled at the edge of the square where the camp police assigned us, the new arrivals, to existing work brigades. I had to remember my place and row, and any lapse in memory was met with blows. Sticks were used to bring the assembly to order. The commandant appeared, rubber baton in hand. He walked around and looked over the brigades, beating anyone he did not like that morning. After this he gave us over to the Lithuanian guards who loaded us onto trucks and drove us to a worksite outside the camp.

The police assigned me to the brigade that worked in the stone quarry. The quarry was located in the forest not far from the main road. Local Ukrainian volunteers dynamited the rock. We then picked up the large pieces, broke them into smaller pieces with sledgehammers, and loaded them onto wagons. We then pushed the wagons on rails to the road where we unloaded them onto waiting trucks. The wagons and trucks formed a nonstop conveyor. The guards were obsessed with keeping the conveyor running smoothly, and anyone who disrupted the rhythm would be in for a very rough time. The guards announced a break at noon. Workers sat on the ground and ate any food they had from the night before. Four prisoners pushed a wheelbarrow carrying a large bucket of water. We were able to drink for the first time since morning. The break offered a 30-minute rest from the nonstop conveyor. Almost nobody managed to make it through a day without being hit by a fist or a stick by the guards. I was quickly convinced that everything I had heard about their cruelty was true.