SROLKE KOT BIALYSTOK IN AUGUST 1944 (Excerpted from his book, The Destruction of Bialystok) In 1944, I returned to Bialystok, my hometown. I was happy that I would see it again, but I was filled with pain and gnawing doubts about what I would find. ‘Logic and the information available to me dictated that I would come upon desolation. But my heart said oth- erwise. Maybe I would find someone, a loved one or a friend. Coming to the outskirts of town, I saw chimney stacks that had been torn from destroyed houses, blown up bridges, the railroad station gutted. Whole streets lay empty before me; other streets had entirely dis- appeared. It was hard to belive anyone had ever lived here. Then I walked toward what had been my home. I had left it the year before, without my brother and sis- ter. The cobblestone pavement leading to the house was almost completely covered with grass, a sign that peo- ple had not walked there in many months. It was as if the stones cried out in anguish: the grass cannot cover us! People will once again tread here! Generations of Jews had made a life for themselves here and we must tell their saga! Homes were demolished, walls absent, windows and doors missing. Jewish books were strewn every- where. Furniture was damaged — chairs without legs, dressers without drawers, broken beds. Feathers from torn mattresses covered photographs of the people who had once lived in these houses: men with beards and sidelocks, or with heads uncovered, women with their traditional wigs or sporting the latest hairdos. I noticed a picture of a child laughing and another of a mother contentedly holding her infant. Surely all this could not have been wiped off the face of the earth. The victims’ spilled blood cried out: What did they do to us and why? I approached my house slowly, as if I were being led to execution. I noticed that not even the shell remained intact, denying me the opportunity of getting down on my knees, having a good cry, holding on to a wall like a child who, having fallen, seeks to get back on his feet by supporting himself against something sta- ble. All I found were some broken foundation stones and half a chimney. Looking about, I tried to pinpoint where the window and the door had been. Where was the bed in which I had slept? I tried to spot where my parents’ wedding picture, happiness and hope brighten- ing their faces, had hung. Pain surged within me. Stand- ing on top of my home’s ruin, I could not help but recall the tragedy that had befallen my family and the rest of the Jewish people. Why did they have to suffer The Bialystoker Memorial Book such brutality needlessly, except for the fact they were Jews? The air I breathed was filled with the smoke of the crematories of Treblinka, Majdanek, Auschwitz and other death camps. At that moment, I felt utterly pow- erless. My feet, which had carried me thousands of miles through forests and highways, muddy roads and underground passageways, seeking to escape the grim fate of my people, buckled. My survival seemed mean- ingless as I spotted a portion of the barbed wire fence, a remnant of the destroyed Bialystok ghetto. I felt guilty that I survived and my loved ones did not. What meaning could my life have when all the love that I had known from childhood had been wrenched away by the Nazis. I was torn between wanting to enter the broken frame of my house in which, to my horror, I might find the skeletons of my lost relatives, and leav- ing — which I could not physically bring myself to do. Nightfall arrived. I wondered how and where I would spend the night. Walking through the wide-open streets, I searched for other human beings, feeling marooned as if on a faraway planet. I asked a Polish woman whether she knew any Jews. She answered that she did not. Then, after many inquiries, I was told that several were staying at a building on 24 Kupiecka Street, which I found in a state of total disrepair, mak- ing it difficult to enter. Climbing the stairs, I went into a dark room and found an emaciated old woman sitting on a broken chair near a table listing to one side because it lacked one leg. I asked her whether Jews lived here and she replied, in a barely audible voice, yes. Then her husband entered the room, so ravaged that he seemed like a pair of pants and shoes covering a skeleton. We talked at length about who had survived and who had died, wanting more information about anyone we might know. It was horrible to imagine that no one knew anything about thousands of Jews who might have survived, who had populated Bialystok only a year before. Only a few returned, some entering this building to spend the night after rummaging through the streets for a few morsels of food. Only one woman who had been our neighbor recognized me. She vouched that I was a Bialystoker, which was very important, because, understandably, the survivors regarded the unfamiliar with suspicion.

The others who arrived were barefoot, without any possessions. They found a corner of the floor to sleep on. Some placed their clenched fists underneath their hands as an uncomfortable pillow and covered them- selves with papers and books scattered throughout the 121