KADDISHEL
A Life Reborn
the commissariat, where he would kill me.” Yenia Gachpinboim, president of the Judenrat, was at the commissariat and convinced Spiegel to let Szteinman go to the kasharan with him and die with her husband. She did not join the line of people heading to the barracks, how - ever. Instead, she went to her house, which she noted was filled with goose feathers from pillows ripped apart when rampaging Ukrainians searched for hidden valuables; and then to a nearby po- tato field, where she covered herself with a bloodstained bedspread and stayed motionless. “People walked near me, but no one noticed I was alive. Others were led to the field and shot, to fall dead on me. I lay in a pool of blood. The Ukrainians began to dig gigantic long pits and said they would pile the Jewish corpses in there. After a while, carts filled with bodies began to arrive and the bodies were thrown into the pits. I lay there watching. 1 felt that at any moment I would lose my wits. The Ukrainians began to collect the corpses around and on top of me but, fortunately, they became tired and decided to put off the rest of their work until the next day.” That night, she said, she crawled away to the home of Piotr Lamoski, a friendly Pole with whom her daughter had been hiding. In Koretz, too, large pits for Jewish prisoners were dug outside of town. Earlier, some of Koretz’s Jews had learned that the Ger- mans were preparing for their mass murder and had organized an escape, but few people were willing or able to join. Moshe Gilden - man, about forty years old and chairman of the Artisans Associa- tion at the time, later described “the apathy — the feeling that noth- ing mattered anymore — that afflicted people as a consequence of the first aktion.... People found it hard to make decisions, to take initiative, or to launch themselves into the unknown in the for- ests....” Several focused on the importance of the Jewish workforce to Germany and continued to believe that only the “unproductive” Jews would be exterminated. After all, if the Jewish forced laborers were executed, their work would have to be done by Germans who were badly needed on the war front. Others feared that they would
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