In a shaded corner of a kibbutz cemetery, bold Hebrew letters in black stand out starkly from a slab of marble embedded in a large rock. Lofty pine trees in abundance stand erect like a guard of honour to those members of the family of Aharon Gottlieb, a carpenter from Wisotzk, Ukraine, who perished in the Holocaust.
Almost fifty years after his death in the Ukrainian forest where he had fled with three of his seven children as German soldiers and their Ukrainian lackeys rounded up Jews in the Wisotzk ghetto, Aharon Gottlieb’s only surviving daughter, Pnina Talmi, approached her kibbutz community with a request to commemorate those members of her family that were taken away from her so violently.
Only in recent years has the attractive, black haired and blue-eyed survivor been able to recount in detail verbally what happened so many dark years ago. A retired social worker who specialized in art therapy, Pnina has over a long period expressed vividly on canvas scenes from her tragic and traumatic past.
Paintings depicting the horrific experience of having an adored older sister torn away from her, and hardships of life on the run in the forest with her father and two of her brothers, used to hang on the walls of her kibbutz home - a daily reminder of the suffering inflicted upon the Gottlieb and millions of other families during those years.
Some years ago Pnina's husband, kibbutz born Yigal Talmi, died of a brain tumour and a short time later when Pnina moved to a newly renovated kibbutz abode the paintings stayed in storage.
The walls of Pnina's home are still full of her art work, and even though very different in style to the previous paintings her latest works also shout loudly of loss, deep pain and enormous anger.
The most amazing fact about these paintings is that Pnina, who also battled and conquered cancer herself after her husband's death, created the present wall hangings with her eyes shut.
To see Pnina with her eyes tightly closed at work in the dark with the lights on all around is an emotional scene in itself. What she creates whilst blindly lost in her imagination is heart wrenching.
Possessing an incredible memory for detail from an extremely early age, years ago Pnina shared some of her memories with her four kibbutz born children - all now married with sons and daughters of their own. As youngsters they heard from Pnina what she now terms her `Legends of the forest’ stories.
Entering her comfortable abode at Kibbutz Mishmar HaEmek, one is immediately struck by the absence of inner walls normally dividing kitchen from dining area and lounge. Commenting on this unusual feature, Pnina explained that she is in need of open spaces. As a result of her childhood experiences, she suffers from claustrophobia.
Before the war the Gottlieb family comprised Aharon, his wife Razel, four daughters and three sons, a twenty-year difference between the elder child and Pnina, the baby of the brood. The family home in Wisotzk was situated on the bank of a river from where they drew water for household needs. The timber built structure had a thatched roof, a wooden fence encompassed the garden and outhouse where Aharon kept his tools, wood and store of wheat from which they made bread.
On the other side of the river was a dense forest. As a small child gazing over the fence, usually adorned with utensils and clothing hung out to dry, and out across the waters, Pnina was convinced that the forest was the end of the world. Little did she know then that where she thought the world ended would be the beginning of a four year terrifying odyssey through the frightening, but protective, refuge of forests and swamps as the remnants of the Gottleib family took flight from the murderous Germans and Ukrainians.
Razal Gottlieb died of tuberculosis before the war when Pnina was just a toddler. Her two eldest sisters married and moved out of the house and her third sister, Meryl, took over caring for Pnina and the men of the household. In l94O Russian soldiers entered Wisotzk. The eldest Gottlieb son and a brother-in-law were conscripted to the Russian army and both survived the war.
When the Russians left, the Germans arrived and after a period of time, Pnina does not know how long, the Jewish area was sealed off and became a ghetto. The Gottlieb abode suddenly became very crowded as the ghetto bulged with outsiders herded in by the Germans. Some of the new home dwellers were relatives, others total strangers.
At first the Gottlieb’s disbelieved the stories of wanton killing, pillage and burning of property - they even thought the storytellers to be a little crazy. It was not long before they overcame their disbelief and prepared themselves for the worst. Pnina well remembers Meryl returning home one day very upset because Ukrainians, her former Wisotzk classmates in fact, had refused to let her leave the ghetto and had threatened her with their rifles.
One evening Aharon told his family that he was going to a meeting of the ghetto committee, the vaad. When it became late, and he had still not returned, an agitated Meryl stood by the window, staring out into the darkness outside. She told her young sister that she felt her heart was being torn out.
“I honestly did not understand what it meant to have ones heart torn out, but I did understand that it was something terrible,” recalled Pnina, her eyes beginning to dampen as the scene flashed before her. Meryl was by then married and the mother of a one-year-old boy, whom the whole family doted on.
In the middle of the night they heard shots and when they looked out, saw a neighbour who had also gone to the vaad with Aharon, dragging himself along the ground clutching at a gaping wound in his stomach. He crawled as far as their house and died.
“By this time Meryl was so afraid and positive that something terrible had happened to father, but he came home just as dawn was breaking,” said Pnina.
The Germans were planning to destroy the ghetto the following day he had been told. The vaad had issued a directive, those who possessed knives, clubs and the like, were to try and defend themselves. Understanding the severity of the situation, Pnina clung hard to Meryl, who had her own child cradled in her arms.
“The last time I saw Meryl, she had put on her Shabbat dress and wore her best shoes, they were blue with a red line down the middle,” said Pnina, squinting as if to get the picture in full focus.
“Meryl was sitting on the house steps holding the baby. They were both crying, but there was no sound, only tears. She looked at me and said she knew she wouldn’t live, that she couldn’t let her baby die alone and that I should go with father and survive.”
A very large crate stood in the outhouse. Aharon furiously emptied out all the contents. Pnina distinctly remembers Meryl hurriedly pushing her inside as she forcefully said “quickly, quickly, the Germans are coming.”
Pnina's brothers, an aunt, uncle and young cousin also joined her. Aharon was the last to squash in, closing the hatch behind him. He sat crouched up, axe in hand.
“We were squashed up tight and lost all sense of time. Our knees were pulled up under our chins, and at one point I thought that I was going to suffocate. I was gulping for air and making quite a bit of noise so my older brother put some clothing over my head and face and this really awful,” said Pnina, subconsciously lowering herself deeper into her chair and speaking significantly quieter.
During the night local Ukrainians were heard shouting outside. They also heard a shot crack out through the still darkness. Two Ukrainians entered the shed as the petrified family, frozen with fear, huddled even tighter together. Aharon poised with his axe, ready to act if the hatch was opened. Spotting honey water and bread in the shed, one Ukrainian commented to the other that there must be Jews somewhere around and began to remove some of things that Meryl had piled on top of the crate. Distracted by events outside, they stopped and left but not before one said to the other that they would return later on.
Opening the hatch, Aharon ordered them all to crawl after him. Leaving the darkness of the crate, they crawled on all fours out in to the dark dank autumn night.
“The memories I have of crawling through the narrow alleyways seem almost surrealistic. Everything was white from feathers. The Ukrainians had shredded all the bedding from the ghetto houses convinced that the Jews had hidden valuables in them.
We were actually quite poor as father had used up anything that he had put aside to pay for mothers hospital care,” she explained.
In snake like formation, Aharon at the helm, Pnina bringing up the rear, made their way to the local cemetery. They came upon a small preparation hut, the door swung freely on its hinges; a dead body wrapped in white cloth lay on the floor inside.
“We used to play in that cemetery. It was full of big trees and the graves were more like tombs with plenty of places to hide,” remembered the `legend’ lady.
Slithering between the graves, and behind some Ukrainians sitting on them leisurely smoking cigarettes, the family passed a freshly dug open ditch.
“I knew people were dying, but I still didn’t really understand what death was,” Pnina commented.
On the bank of the river, Aharon hoisted his exhausted daughter up on to his shoulders and entered the water, the others followed close behind. All of them made it successfully to the other side. As soon as they reached cover of the trees, Aharon ordered them on telling them to run as fast as they could deep into the forest. Only when dawn approached did he allow them to rest.
“Everything was so green and lush, the earth smelled so fresh and everything glistened with dew,” Pnina recalled.
Suddenly Yitzhak, her older brother, full of anguish and anger, began to claw at the damp earth with his bare hands whilst crying out, “Why did they have to kill the baby, why the baby?”
“My father started to scream as well and I remember feeling totally drained of emotions as young as I was. I think at this point I knew I had to survive and become a small animal, with animal instinct, everything else just withered....disappeared,” Pnina sighed.
Aharon Gottlieb was a countryman. He could swim whereas most of his fellow Wisotzk Jews could not. He often ventured deep in to the forest on long walks, sometimes finding work in the outlying Ukrainian farming communities where he would build and repair flour mills.
The blonde, blue-eyed carpenter and his family were not religious but celebrated all the festivals.
“When we stopped to rest, father told us people knew him in that area, some even owed him for work he had done. He was positive they would help us, and he went off to find food,” she said.
The family made a makeshift shelter from branches and leaves and settled down to await the return of Aharon. Suddenly an old lady stepped out of one of the bushes and gave them a hard crust of bread each.
“Then father returned with bread and milk. He was very upset having gone to a house of a man for whom he had done some work and was told nastily to go away, not to endanger them as well,” Pnina remembers.
So enraged was Aharon, he had hit the man and managed to get the bread and milk out of him for his runaways in the forest. “When father told us what had happened and that he actually hit the man, I thought he was such a hero,” laughed Pnina.
In the morning the family awoke, the old lady was still sleeping soundly. Aharon told them to leave quietly as they could not take her with. “It was definitely the survival of the fittest, small children and old folk were burdens and left behind, even by the Partisans,” Pnina added sadly.
Aharon taught his children how to survive in the wild. “Father showed us how to dig out potatoes from the earth in such a way as to leave the greenery above ground still standing. Sometimes we slept in hay stacks; he showed us how to burrow in to the base so that nobody would know that we had been there.”
Months went by as they wandered through the forest and autumn turned to winter bringing with bitter cold, blizzards and heavy snowstorms. “In the evenings father would use flints and light a fire which we would huddle around. Everywhere we stopped we built a shelter. We were still in the same clothes we had left Wisotzk in. My hair was matted solid and full of fleas, and I began to wet myself all the time,” she painfully reminisced. When she shook her head, the snow would turn black at her feet as dead lice fell from her.
Aharon would sometimes return empty handed from his searches and other times he would return with flour they mixed with water to make a paste. “A few times he came back with a little salt, which was like gold - we would lick it,” said Pnina, smiling at the recollection.
One day the family spotted some men a distance away with what appeared to be rifles. Aharon gathered up his children, by this time the other relatives had left them and gone their own way, and began to run in the opposite direction to the intruders. Pnina got lost. She spent a terrifying three days and nights alone in the forest before she was to see another human being again. “When we started running I had my shoes in my hand and just ran and ran and ran. When I realized that I was lost, I also knew that I could not shout and so sat under a tree, petrified at being alone in the dark and more than anything, frightened of the fact that I was convinced I was the only one left,” she said.
On the third morning she awoke to the sound of a cock crowing and dog barking. Following the direction of the sounds, she came upon a small Ukrainian village, and found herself facing a terrible dilemma. “It was almost as frightening knowing there are people around as the opposite. I knew I needed people in order to survive, but how I tell if they would help or hunt me down?
My father had said to me many times, if anyone asks who I am to say that I was Gottlieb’s daughter,” she recounted, and continued to describe how she darted between buildings looking for the smallest, poorest abode, logic telling her that they would be kinder, rich people in big houses posed a threat.
As a woman opened the door, Pnina caught sight of potatoes roasting over an open fire, bread and milk on a table. The startled woman, seeing the dazed and filthy form in tattered clothing standing before her, gave a yelp and shouted “what’s that?”
“Gottlieb’s daughter,” came the weak reply, as Pnina tottered on her hugely swollen feet, her whole emaciated body racked in hunger induced agony, the depth of which she has never forgotten.
The shocked woman took her in, gave her food and milk and let her warm herself by the all-inviting fire. She told Pnina that she could not stay with her, but that she would take her to Partisans nearby. When she was able to stand, the woman took her by the hand and led her to another abode, knocked on the door and ran away, leaving Pnina standing alone on the doorstep. “The Partisans took me back to the forest, found father and my brothers and then they left. They also did not want to be burdened with people like us, the forest was full of people hiding,” she explained.
“Father was so agitated. He had been searching for me, knocking his axe on tree trunks in the hope that I would hear,” she said, looking down at her hands as she struggled with her emotions. That evening Aharon went foraging and returned with some flour. As her brothers prepared a fire, the exhausted man lay down to rest, asking Yitzik and Leon to awaken him when the water had boiled. When it did, they told Pnina to rouse him.
“When I bent over him I saw that he had froth coming out of the sides of his mouth and his face looked so strange. I kept telling him the water was boiled and eventually he stirred and started to crawl towards the fire - I was so frightened, he just didn’t seem like father any more, and I backed away and half hid in the undergrowth.”
Aharon continued to painfully drag himself excruciatingly slowly towards where Pnina was cowering. Although she was not very far away, she remembers that what transpired that awful night was over a period of hours. Approaching the fire between them, the semi-conscious Aharon knocked over a can of water and suddenly his coat caught fire. His frantic sons began to rip of his clothing and for the first time Pnina saw that her father was literally a skeleton. “He would always return with morsels of food for us and say that he had eaten, but obviously that was not true.”
Traumatized, she was rooted to the spot. Aharon crawled to her, stretched out his bonny hand and gently stroked her cheek. Asking her not to forget her mother’s Yartzheit, he died at her feet. Her brothers put their father’s body inside their shelter of branches and the rest of the night they all slept together for the last time.
“At one stage they both went out to the toilet and I did not want to stay alone with the body so I said I needed to go as well. Leon said that I should not be scared to stay with father because I was always his favorite.”
The siblings then continued on their journey into the unknown, alone. The threesome came upon a damaged and almost deserted village where some Ukrainian locals had erected shelters. Leon left Yitzik and Pnina near one of the shelters and told them he would soon return. When he didn’t come back after a long time, Yitzik asked one of the Ukrainians if he knew where their brother was. “He told us he could not take the responsibility for two children and he has gone off to join the Partisans,” he told them. The devastated pair, the ten year-old boy and seven year-old girl, began to walk again in the forest. They came upon an old Jewish man who asked where they were going. Yitzik explained to the old man that their father had died, brother gone to join the Partisans, and they wanted to do the same. “The Partisans might take you,” the old man told Yitzik, “but they certainly will not take your sister.”
Yitzik decided to leave Pnina with the elderly man, and went off in search of Leon and the freedom fighters.
Pnina’s new benefactor told her to sit and wait for him to bring some food. Patiently she waited, but he did not return. Later two young men came to tell her the old man was sick with stomach typhus and had sent them to fetch her. After walking some distance they found the old man almost unconscious under a tree, a sack of potatoes at his side. The young men left, and Pnina ate some of the potatoes and then fell asleep.
She was to stay prostrate on the ground for some days, stricken with the same debilitating stomach typhus as the old gent dying beside her. Running a high fever, sleeping fitfully, hallucinating and lying in her own body waste, Pnina was unable to move. When the fever subsided and she was once again aware of her surroundings, the old man asked her to fetch someone by the name of Ivan as he was dying.
“I looked at him and thought to myself that I had no wish to sleep again next to another dead body, and so I quietly crawled away and left him there,” she said.
All of a sudden she heard singing coming through the forest and thought she must still be hallucinating. Approaching the verge of the forest she saw a large group of Ukrainian women picking potatoes and singing loudly as they worked. Rustling the undergrowth as she crawled alongside the field, one of the women picked up the sound.
“What is that?” she asked.
“Gottliebs’s daughter,” Pnina replied.
The woman peered at her as she emerged from the undergrowth and realizing that it was a child, told her to follow her, and that she would take her to some Partisans that she knew in the area.
“The Partisans had big tubs of water for doing their laundry and they put me in a tub and cut my hair. My whole body was full of bruises, cuts and festering sores. I do not remember the bath hurting my sores, but sure do remember the water being too cold,” she said with a chuckle.
Pnina’s clothes, if one could call them that, were put on an anthill so that the ants could eat the lice, and in the meantime they dressed her in a large boy's shirt. The Partisans knew of a Ukrainian couple wanting someone to look after their baby and took Pnina to them - also wanting to rid themselves of the youngster.
“The couple, in their early twenties, lived in one of these shanty huts. One day during a really heavy blizzard when they wanted to be alone, they sent me out to get something from the neighbors a few kilometers away.” Battling her way through the storm, her feet wrapped in rags and wracked by cold, she arrived at the neighbors. Shocked that the couple could send her out in such weather, the woman of the house told her “so what if you are a Jewess, people don’t send dogs out in this weather.”
The woman and her husband let her stay with them. Then the Russians arrived.
Vania, the man of the household, ran away. Apparently a member of the Ukrainian nationalist organization, his wife told Pnina that if asked by the Russians she should say that she had never seen him. Befriended by one of the soldiers, who told her he was also Jewish and therefore she need not be frightened of him, she stuck to her story of not having seen Vania when he asked. Eventually Vania was discovered and brought back to the village. He, his wife and Pnina were then taken to Wisotzk!
Once back in familiar territory, she went off to explore and hope to find her family abode.
“I walked along the river bank but when I reached the spot where our house had stood, there was nothing - and so I just turned around and went back to Vania and his wife.”
When she walked in to a local shop, all the people stared at her. When one asked her who she was she answered, without hesitation, “Gottlieb’s daughter.”
A young man came along one day and told her that he had been sent to take care of Jewish children in the area and Pnina was taken to the relatives from another town that had shared that fateful night in the crate with the Gottliebs.
The relatives house was full of Partisans and everybody spoke Yiddish, but the bewildered little girl in their midst only spoke Ukrainian. However, she did know a few Yiddish songs from her `childhood’ and remembers climbing on a table and giving a hearty rendering of one of them.
It was in this house that she was reunited with Yitzik. Fair, like his father, Yitzik had ended up with the Sobotniks, a religious people who were very impressed by Yitzik’s ability to read the bible in Hebrew and treated him with great reverence. From their cousin’s house the children started yet another long journey -to Israel. They were smuggled across borders, spending time in an orphanage and a displaced persons camp were to be experienced before finally arriving with the first boat of legal immigrants in l946 to the shores of the Promised Land.
Once landed the newcomers were processed at the Atlit camp. Some of them were formed in to groups, according to age, and sent out to kibbutzim.
To this day Pnina is unsure of her exact age, but what she did know back then in l946, was that she wanted to go to Kibbutz Mishmar HaEmek in the Jezreel Valley. During her sojourns through the European rescue network, Pnina had been part of a drama group that put on a play, her part in the production was that of a child who had grown up in that particular kibbutz.
In Atlit, upon hearing another girl give her age and get placed at Mishmar HaEmek, Pnina gave the same age for herself, and her wish was granted. It was not long before it became obvious to all that she had never been to school and that she was two or three years younger than her `peer’ group in the kibbutz.
“I was in absolute awe of everything when we got here. I had never seen water spurt out of a tap, or electric light - we always used candles or paraffin. Here they were trying to teach me about the world with a big colorful atlas and all I wanted to know was how come water came out of the wall or light come from just pressing a button,” said a smiling Pnina.
Pnina’s older brother, conscripted to the Russian army, arrived in Israel in l958 with his family, and settled in Beersheva. Yitzik became a member of a kibbutz in the southern part of Israel, and Leon remained in Europe after the war living in Italy where he studied art.
Learning that he had a heart disease and unlikely to reach the age of forty, Leon decided not to contact the family members in Israel as he did not want to cause them further suffering. On passing his fortieth birthday, Leon Gottlieb decided this was a good sign and should contact the family.
“Seeing him again after so many years was so emotional. We found that the strong bond we had shared before the war was still there, something very special,” Pnina concluded.
Sadly a few short years and as many short visits to his family in Israel later, Leon died in Italy.
For many years Pnina Talmi Gottlieb, the only surviving daughter of Aharon and Razel, suppressed deep pain and kept her emotions bottled up - sealed through witnessing such horror in a Ukrainian forest where even as a small child she understood that survival depended on keeping her wits sharp, emotions blunted and stunted.
With passing time her emotions became rekindled and replenished, and she also began to paint.
“Colors are feelings and lead to emotional awakenings deep inside, an all important factor...stress relief,” said Pnina, once again sweeping her gaze over the predominantly blue and green hued paintings of her past, surrounding her present day and future.
The shaded corner of the Israeli kibbutz cemetery, in the middle of a forest of pine trees, cones and needles lying all around, is perhaps the most natural of places to salute the bravery of Aharon Gottlieb and his children.
The tall, majestic, gently swaying and soft swishing pines stand as Mother Nature’s witness when the lady comes to sit quietly by the lettered marble plaque and silently, agonizingly screams..................
“I am Gottlieb’s daughter.”
end.
