There are lies, damn lies, and then there are statistics. Thus posited Mark Twain, who attributed the origin of that scathing observation to 19th-century Jewish British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli. The saying suggests that attempting to encapsulate some event or other in pure numerical terms belies the facts-on-the-ground truth.
Which brings us all too neatly, and chillingly, to what, for many of us, is the most potent and emotive statistic of all – six million – the approximate number of Jews murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators across Europe, in North Africa, in some Arab countries, and in the Far East, during the Holocaust.
That is a staggering figure, no matter how many times it is rolled out at official events, in literature, and on the silver screen. But the danger of succumbing to tropes is that we can so easily forget or unwittingly circumnavigate the inescapable fact that these were six million individual lives that were viciously decimated and cut short, and after the victims were subjected to all manner of unspeakable horrors.
As such, accounts of the lives of individual Jews in Europe during the Holocaust – including those who survived against seemingly impossible odds – are all the more precious and invaluable to perpetuating the memories of the victims and keeping the lessons to be learned from that ignominious chapter of human history uppermost in our minds.
That counts doubly for the testimonies of the survivors, eyewitnesses to Nazi bestiality, who somehow endured indescribable physical and emotional suffering for years. Incredibly, they mostly picked themselves up after the war ended and managed to carve a new life for themselves, albeit bearing indelible scars that impacted them and their offspring.
Lord knows, we’ve had some grim times across this still-young country’s history, but how can one possibly imagine enduring the constant terror and deprivation that went with uncertain life in the ghettos of Poland, Belarus, and elsewhere?
How can you grasp the courage, determination, and sheer willpower it took to live through two or three or more years hiding from the Nazis in forests, as members of partisan groups or completely isolated from other Jews, trying desperately to keep body and soul together by any means available?
Surviving the long, ineffable inferno of the Holocaust
Lazar Engles and Ruth Leimenzon Engles went through the long, ineffable inferno and managed not only to physically survive the Holocaust; they succeeded in rehabilitating their lives – to a greater or lesser degree – and started a family. This was after both had lost almost every member of their own close relatives, including their partners and, in Lazar’s case, children.
That, and so much more, is succinctly, emotively, and unequivocally conveyed in the first person in the memoirs written by both Engles and Leimenzon Engles and published by Yad Vashem.
The former is called Our Partisan Kingdom, exegetically subtitled From the Vilna Ghetto to the Bielski Family Camp. Ruth’s is called Written in a Barn: The Diary of a Young Woman from Vilna.
Both tomes were lovingly and painstakingly translated from Yiddish into English by their son David Engles, who recently completed his first fourscore years on terra firma.
He moved to the United States from a DP camp in Italy with his parents as a small child. He eventually made aliyah and set up a house in Netanya together with his wife Eva, also the offspring of Holocaust survivors. Their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren all live in Israel.
Our Partisan Kingdom is a simply incredible tale of survival, from a string of ghettos – including Vilna, Woronow, and Lida – until Lazar somehow managed to escape, initially from the Vilna ghetto, with the help of an officer in the German army, ultimately making it to the forests of Western Belorussia, then part of Poland.
There, he joined a group of partisans led by Tuvia Bielski and three of Bielski’s 11 siblings, who set up a well-oiled camp complete with a hospital, school, and other facilities. The group’s principal military activity was aimed at saving Jews rather than attacking Nazi units per se.
Many of the group’s members made it through the war alive
Amazingly, many members of the group survived the war, including Bielski and Lazar, who served as the camp cook.
The first-person narrative makes for gripping reading. And its immediacy and potency are accentuated by the fact that Engles junior not only translated the text into English, but also pulled out all the stops in tracking down all the sources of historical data he could possibly find and even, at times, amended his father’s writing to steer the compelling tale into more accurate factual waters.
Not that the odd veracity faux pas, such as misremembering an address in one of the ghettos, would have made Our Partisan Kingdom any less engrossing or moving, but David’s devotion to the commemorative personal task in hand adds cogency and value to the literary end product.
If the tale behind Our Partisan Kingdom is incredible, Written in a Barn, it simply beggars belief. While the former is the result of Engles’ senior’s recollections, which he registered soon after the end of World War II, Leimenzon Engles recorded her experiences and jotted down her emotions while she was in the throes of the grueling passage of time, as she hid in a haystack in a barn on a farm belonging to a Polish Christian family.
She spent 10 months incarcerated there, unable to even wash for weeks on end, petrified of being discovered by any of the motley groups of workers, soldiers, and others who passed by. Though her hosts provided her with sustenance, it was at times miserly and erratic.
As David notes in My Mother’s Legacy, his foreword to Ruth’s book, it was “very important for my father to keep the memory of Vilna alive, and to do everything possible to not let the world forget the Holocaust.” Ruth, who died at the age of only 40, was clearly blessed with fortitude and emotional resilience, level-headedness, and inexhaustible resourcefulness. Her diary was not meant for public consumption and was basically a means for her to make it through each day and not go out of her mind. That adds to the intimacy of her words and draws the reader into the thick of her very personal odyssey.
Even as the son of a Holocaust survivor myself, albeit one – my mother – who escaped on a Kindertransport rather than going through the horror of a concentration camp, with all the emotional scarring spillage unwittingly and unavoidably handed down – it is hard for me to imagine how anyone got through the devastation and bestial cruelty the Nazis and their helpers unleashed on the Jews and other ethnic and social minorities.
Reading Our Partisan Kingdom and Written in a Barn brings us a couple of steps closer to what actually happened, on a day-to-day personal corporeal level, thereby also helping to keep the memories of the victims and survivors – who, naturally, were also victims – alive, and hopefully to make us aware of the lessons to be learned.
Written in a Barn was reviewed in the Magazine by Andrea Samuels in August 2024.
Our Partisan Kingdom – From the Vilna Ghetto to the Bielski Family Camp
By Lazar Engles
(Engelshtern)
Yad Vashem
199 pages; NIS 104
