A decision was rewarded in the hearts of the 500 Jews in the Lutsk ghetto, and they, stood proud and ready for battle • When it came from outside the cry, "Juden, Reus!" One of the Jews replied "Death to the Germans!"
Entrance to the Lutsk ghetto // Photo: Courtesy of Yad Vashem
The story of the Jewish uprising in the Lutsk ghetto, which took place in December 1942, is referred to by many as "the Wahlin Masada." The last 500 Jews of Lutsk in western Ukraine preferred to fight, if only for one day, with the Nazi killers and their local partners, even if they paid for it in their lives.
Like the rebels of Masada, the rebels of Lutsk also had no illusions. In the year and a half that preceded their desperate move, they lost everything and saw their families being slaughtered. The thought that as long as they were useful to the Germans would keep them alive - also faded, leaving only Jewish self-respect and dignity.
And as in the story of Masada, where the individual survived the inferno and created the heroic story to pass it on to the next generation, so did Lutsk. Shmulik Sheila (Shillman), then a 13-year-old boy, was probably the only survivor of the rebellion, and until his last day did everything possible to keep his participants from disappearing into oblivion. His memoir, "A Personal Story?", Shed light on one of the first occasions when German soldiers encountered intense resistance from Jews whose only weapon was despair.
Stanislav Seltzer, an Israeli theater director and screenwriter who has been working in Moscow for the past few years, is one of the people exposed to Shiloh's testimony, and since then the story of the ghetto uprising has given him no rest. "In 2012, a year after Sheila's passing, I totally happened to see a brief journalistic report on the bitter fate of the Lutsk ghetto," Seltzer says in a conversation with "Israel Today," "and in all the years that have gone by I continue to investigate the rebellion more and more. Perhaps this is the mental identification with Shmulik, the boy who celebrated his birthday 13 days before the uprising, and even before that he lost almost his entire family, but survived to hold a memory and later became the embodiment of the entire Jewish rebirth story. My.
"I am a native of Nikolaev, another Ukrainian city. I played soccer in a group of boys at a city club, and when they set up a new soccer field, bones were found. I found myself a Russian-inscribed charcoal on the rock; the words were eroded, but I could clearly read them: 'We are the Steinberg family, We were murdered. "It turned out to be a site where Nikolaev's Jews were shot. It turned out that our coach's older brother was a German and Jewish service cop. This cop was hanged after the war, but that coach was not ashamed to show off to those who teased him with family wealth, wealth accumulated as much Apparently from valuables stolen from Jewish victims. "
Last remnant of a magnificent community
The uprising was the final chapter in the tragedy of the Jews of Lutsk during the Holocaust. The death and destruction mask began as soon as the Wehrmacht front units entered the city, and, like countless other towns and cities, progressed in stages. Lutsk fell to the Germans on June 26, 1941, just four days after the Nazis launched an attack on the USSR, so few Jews managed to flee eastward or join the Red Army. Already on June 29, the Ukrainian police established by the Nazis and the Gestapo Nearly two thousand Jews, most of them middle-aged men, were taken out of the homes and murdered in an unknown place, a few days later, which issued an order directing all Jewish men from the ages of 16 to 60 to "work" in the Fortress of Lubert, who, about 3,000, were brutally murdered in the fortress. .
On December 11, 1941, within a few minutes, thousands of Jews were deported from their homes in various parts of the city and taken to Basilianski Street. Elderly and sick people who retarded the menace of the ghetto, were murdered there instead by the German escorts. The rest were locked in the ghetto between the two channels of the river Stir, to which Jews from several villages were also joined. Nine months later, in August 1942, after the ghetto residents were starved, starved and taken out with ransom, all their property, the Germans went to the final liquidation. For a few days some 17,000 Jews were shot in the suburbs by the name of Gorka Polonka.
Meticulously, the killers chased even those who were hiding, passing from house to house and shooting every Jew they found, from small to large.
At this time, the 500 Jews who were imprisoned in October 1941 in a special labor camp for Jewish craftsmen and workers remained the last vestige of the glorious community. The camp was initially located on Krasna Street, and over time it was moved to the Jewish Gymnasium (Pinchuk's flour mill in the past). The prisoners were held in extremely harsh conditions and forced to work as slaves for Germany's war effort. They knew about what was going on outside, and heard about the waves of disturbances made in their brothers. When the ghetto was liquidated, even those who planted hope in hard labor as a chance to be saved, realized that the inevitable end was imminent.
"The camp inmates realized that the Germans intended to destroy them all, and that the only way left was to try to escape to the forests and connect with the partisans or find hiding places," explains Seltzer. "At that point, all the guards, both the Germans and the Ukrainians, saw the Jewish prisoners break a tool, a sub human being who lost all willpower, and therefore posed no danger. The truth was different - among the prisoners was getting organized and fleeing, and among its people was Mickey Shillman, Shmulik's older brother The Jews had plans to take advantage of the Christmas festivities and organize a mass escape. And so it was decided to destroy all the surviving Jews. "
The last "Aktion" was set for December 12, 1942. According to one version, the evening before, a local woman working at a German headquarters told one of the Jews that the entire camp would be liquidated the next day. According to another version, instead of the rumor came a sight: the camp was completely surrounded by German units, the Jews crowded two different buildings, and the escape dreams were shattered. The Germans feared resistance and came to task with increased equipment and helmets, as if they knew they were expecting combat. They placed machine guns in front of the camp. In addition, the connection between the two buildings was not possible - when they opened a window to shout something to the residents of the other building, the Germans would open fire immediately.
With bare hands
Sheila described the drama that ensued among Jews preparing for their last days: And we all die with respect. "
Most of the prisoners were swept away by the call of Moishe the Belar. The fur fell, and desperate joy spread among all. The Jews who just bowed an hour ago, stood proud and ready for battle. All the food that was hidden in time was put on the table for a last supper. In one corner vodka bottles were passed from mouth to mouth. In another corner stood Jews wrapped in prayer shawls and said confession. The adults continued to pray all night, others set up makeshift barricades at the doors and searched for any object that could be used as a weapon - dismantled tables and interior walls and handed out tools and bottles of acid.
At dawn they arrived at a truck complex, and outside the order was "Juden, Reus" - "Jews, out!" After the order was of no use, Ukrainian police and their German commander tried to enter the camp. Suddenly one of the Jews shouted "Death to the Germans!", And on the police landed a meter of bricks, woodcuts and bottles of acid. Shouting cheers "Blood under blood!" They heard from the buildings and mingled in the wail of the German commander. The acid water poured down his face and burned his eyes. His bruised and wounded subordinates rushed to retreat.
In response, the Germans resorted to a ploy that served them well throughout the Holocaust. They sought to take advantage of the fact that even in the psyche of death, until the last moment, a last ember of hope was kept, and appealed to the barracks with a tempting suggestion: leave without fear that you will be transferred to another labor camp, where you need your facts. But this time the temptation didn't work. The blood that was being pursued for the first time in the eyes of the victims, the desire for revenge, and the understanding that in each case burial pits were awaiting, took the humiliated prisoners with surprising confidence and self-respect.
The news of the riots in the camp soon spread throughout Lutsk. Fighting Jews in Germans? The townspeople couldn't believe their ears, so they hurried to finish work, close stores, and wait for developments. The Germans could not afford to wait any longer, they fired fire on the camp and commanded the Ukrainian police to attack the buildings. But the second wave was also repulsed. This time, the rebels were also killed and wounded, but the stones, sticks and axes stopped the attackers face to face and forced them to retreat again.
The evening was approaching, and the prisoners thought that if they succeeded in attracting time, perhaps some of them could escape under the cover of darkness. The Germans understood that too. They summoned reinforcements and attacked the camp on all sides. The power relations began to decide the fighting: the Germans occupied room after room. The Jews who succeeded in apprehending tortured their friends in the eyes of their entrenched friends. The number of defenders was dwindling. Those who stayed inside recognized that the decision was imminent and decided to storm bare hands on the chain of policemen surrounding the camp. It was clear this last battle oil none of them would come out alive. The people parted, embraced and shook hands. They set fire to the building and leapt outside, to the enemy's nests and barbed-wire fences, with shouts of Shema Israel and the International Song.
Little Shmulik saw through his window his adult friends shooting. He ran to hide under a flight of stairs and tried to cover himself with chunks of firewood. A young couple was running down the stairs of the building next to him, but the place couldn't hide the three of them - the guy realized that, he quickly covered Shmulik, thus sacrificing himself and his partner's only chance. "Maybe you will be saved," he told him as a commandment. "Then remember us, tell the world what the Germans have done to us and avenge all of us."
The holy heroes
The rebellion is over. Police entered the camp to slaughter the wounded Jews and scan the buildings in search of hiding. Two of them checked the space below the staircase, lit the match, felt the pieces of peat ... and overlooked Shmulik lying there with a breath. At night, after the Germans and Ukrainians left and settled quietly, he got out of hiding and saw three more Jews who managed to hide from the killers, but had to say goodbye. A 13-year-old Jewish boy who was left alone in a hostile and threatening world and had to hide and fight for his life for about a year and a half, until the liberation of the city and its surroundings by the Red Army.
"Shmulik's life story has a huge resemblance to the story of the State of Israel," Seltzer concludes. "With his own eyes, the eyes of a little boy, he saw the worst of it. A Catholic priest pressured him to convert to a rescue, and in this test, too, Molick stood and did not surrender. He joined the partisans and survived the Holocaust, and after his liberation found his sister who also survived a miracle. The youth in Italy, emigrated to Israel on a illegal immigration ship, were arrested in the British camps in Cyprus, fought in the War of Independence, and subsequently were among the founders of Kibbutz Ze'elim.
He studied theater and acting, became an actor and started a family. Incredible life story. However, it seems to me that throughout his life he bore the burden of memory, as he had sworn to do by that obscure fellow who had given up his chance to hide, and saved his life after defeating the rebellion.
"Shmulik vowed to remember and tell. Although he did it over and over, I always felt that he didn't do enough. Fate wanted, and I didn't get to meet him in his life, and yet I insist on continuing his mission - to remember and tell. For two years I have been writing a script The film about the life of Shmuel Shmuel, as well as the translation of his book of testimony into Russian: The Lutsk ghetto uprising, in which Shmulik envisioned as a child, was one of the special heroic chapters of the Holocaust period. They demonstrated to the German clergy, to locals who preferred to close their eyes and to the whole world, what a dare of those who had nothing to lose. Well remember them, and tell them, 'holy heroes Lutsk ghetto us. " √