DR. SZYMON DATNER TRAGIC MESSAGES FROM THE LAST JEWS I returned to Bialystok in the early days of August 1944, after a brief bout with typhus. Soon I became a member of the National Reconstruction Council, which immediately plunged into the herculean task of rebuild- ing the Polish and Jewish communities in Bialystok. In September or October 1944, it was learned that many messages were carved in the walls of the prison in Bialystok in Polish and Yiddish, apparently by the last remaining Jews in the ghetto. Since these inscriptions might possess historical significance, the reconstruction committee sent a delegation, including me, to inspect these areas. We found the graffiti quite legible but heartrend- ing. As the only Jew in the group, it was my task to translate the Yiddish words. All the inscriptions men- tioned the names of their authors, the dates on which they met their brutal deaths, and the refrain, ‘“‘Do not forget us. Avenge our death.” In death chamber 81, three wall inscriptions were carved in Yiddish. Lea Perlsztejn, the only girl in the cell, wrote her name phonetically three times. The second message was engraved in Yiddish and Polish: ‘‘Jechiel Gurwicz was murdered January 23, 1944, because he was a Jew.”’ [The date appears to be incorrect. ] The third inscription belonged to a family. Death cell 80 had five wall carvings, two in Polish: “Szolem Zinger; Koczkowski brothers, Z.L.; Awrom Lew and Sokoli, Purim, 1944; Telman, Dowid, Zgierz; Goldfarb, Zalman, Slonim. “Tzchok Kulkin perished in the Bialystok prison 15.7.44 for the Jewish people. Avenge his death. ‘‘Born at Bielsk-Podlaski, 1921. I was the last Jew in the prison. Enach Gofman. Go to your death with head held high. Farewell to my friends, the Okun and Pozanski brothers. Avenge my death. They tortured me but I revealed nothing. Avenge me. “We go to our death calmly; we can fight no longer. Avenge us. Awreml Boczkowski, Bialystok; Kirszenbojm, Kulkin, the Lifces brothers, Meir Prusak, Grodno. “Their fate should be worse than what they did to us Jews. The last day of our life, 15.7.44.” These macabre last words were inscribed during the final days of Nazi rule in Bialystok. On July 27, 1944, the first battalions of the Red Army entered Bia- lystok, together with Partisan forces containing many Jews. The Nazis murdered a few remaining Jews until five minutes before the Russians arrived. The last testa- ments of their victims, however, remained scribbled on the walls of the prison. The Bialystoker Memorial Book Years afterward, when I opened my notebook where I had written down the words of these martyrs, the cry for retribution still rang in my ears. How 1s it possible to avenge the more than 100,000 Jews who per- ished in the Bialystok region? Can we ever fulfill their last wish? Perhaps the greatest retaliation is that we, their survivors, are here to tell their story. Suicides in the Ghetto Lite, in the Jewish tradition, has always been of supreme value. Taking one’s own life was looked upon as an act of murder. The family of a suicide was stig- matized for generations afterward. This attitude also prevailed in Jewish Bialystok. But the apocalyptic events of the Nazi occupation did bring about a small incidence of suicide. The mass incineration of 2,000 Jews in the Great Synagogue, the “Thursday,” “Saturday,” and “Sunday massacres,”’ the construction of the ghetto, the yellow badges, the sadis- tic jeering, the poverty, the slave labor, continuous fear and insecurity, thousands of human sacrifices, young children suddenly orphaned — all these phenomena broke down some Jews’ will to live and severely demor- alized the entire community. Some susceptible individu- als turned to suicide. But these desperate acts never took place on a large scale in Bialystok. After November 1942, when it became clear that all Jews in the Bialystok region were destined to be exterminated — the specter of gas chambers pressing on the minds of Jews in the Bialystok ghetto — some peo- ple made their decision: better to die by one’s own hand than in a Nazi death camp. On the eve of the February liquidation campaign in 1943, some poisoned them- selves, while others fashioned gallows. These included: Kagan, the fruiterer, whose store was on Lipowa Street; Chaim Grynsztejn, bricklayer, who lived on Supra- selske Street; Szloyjme Jankelew, barber; Dr. Franka Horowicz, instructor at the Hebrew Gynmasium; three orphans killed themselves in a suicide pact at the orphanage on Czestochowski Street. Most of the people I knew, however, albeit shattered and in deep mourn- ing, wanted to continue living.

In August 1943, when the Bialystok ghetto was finally liquidated, more suicides took place, among them Mordechaj Tenenbaum-Tamarof, one of the founders of the secret ghetto archive, and Dontel Mosz- kowicz, the communist. Only their Jewishness bound these two very different men to the same fate. In the surgical department of the Jewish Hospital on Fabryczna Street, as the patients were led away to be 81