Roald Hoffman - Cocoon of Love

 

When the war began, I was four years old. What war? We all have our wars. Mine was World War II. You can tell from my age. I was born to a happy Jewish family in a very bad place to be born at that time and at the wrong time. And that was southeast Poland. And in July 1941, the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union, ran over the town where we were. In that first week, there were many losses. My grandfather was killed. The Ukrainians in town rounded up the people, drove them up to the castle, where SS Einsatzgruppen killed 2,000 people.

 

Things did not get better. We stayed in that town a little while, and then later went to a labor camp called [unintelligible 00:37:38]. This was essentially slave labor to fix blown up bridges and roads. My father was a civil engineer, was valuable to the Germans, because he had built those roads. And so, he had some privileges in the labor camp, where we all were. He could pass in and out. And the only documents we have from the war, in fact, are some passes which say the Jew Hillel Safran can pass out of this camp.

 

One day, two German officers came into the camp. And perhaps looking for some to scare us, and they said to my mother, "Tell the boy to sit on a doghouse." There was a dog house. And one of them said, "I'm going to shoot the dog." And the other one said, "What if Klaus' misses?" And they all laughed. I went and sat on the doghouse. One of them pulls out his gun, takes one shot in the air. The dog runs out, shoots the dog with a second shot just centimeters away from where I was.

 

The situation got very bad in time. There were people who were being sent to the extermination camps. No one wanted to believe it, but my father and mother believed it. They found a friendly Ukrainian schoolteacher in a nearby village who offered to hide us. And one dark night, we walked out of the camp. You could bribe the guards. This was not an extermination camp. We walked to that schoolhouse and went into the attic. We did not leave that schoolhouse for 15 months. That was January 1943. This was a one-room schoolhouse. The village had maybe 200 souls. Maybe 30 kids were there. The front room was a one-room schoolhouse. In the back, the teacher lived. Above was the attic. That’s where we were.

 

Food was brought up once a day in a pail. Slops were taken away. There was one window. There were slats in the window, and we put a cloth over it at night. We rarely lit a light. I sat by that window. In the attic, I slept in on a straw mattress. There was a bag of peas as a pillow. I looked out that window, and I could see children playing outside. It was a schoolhouse, after all. I could hear them during recess, running. But I knew I couldn't be with them.

 

Among those children were actually a few Jewish boys who were kept at the orphanage at the monastery at the end of the road in this little village of Univ. They were kept there under false identities. The monks saved them, the Ukrainian-Greek Catholic monks. I played games. My mother taught me how to read. She invented all these games. There were geography books there. This was a schoolhouse. They were stored up there. She taught me latitude and longitude. We played these games where she would give me a latitude and longitude and I would have to say whether it was wet or dry. The skill thing was she would try to find a lake in the middle, like the great lakes of the Aral Sea. So, I would fall down. 

 

She asked me, "How do you go from here to there? Like, how do you go from Univ, the village where we were, to Montevideo or to California?" I would have to name every sea along the way. Some of those passes around Denmark have pretty hairy names for a little boy. [audience laughter] And in there were actually four people initially, an uncle and aunt, my mother and I. My father would join us later. Uncle and aunt had a two-year-old. I was five years old, almost five years, four and a half, when went into the attic. The uncle and the aunt had a two-year-old at that time. It was judged that I would keep quiet. But the two-year-old would not be able to keep quiet in the attic. She was given to a Polish family to keep. And neither the Polish family nor the little girl survived the war.

 

Once in a while, in the beginning of our stay, my father would come to visit. One time he brought some candy. I can't imagine now what it must have cost to find some candy in that time of war, but he found it. One day, he did not come. And the letter was slipped under our door saying that his attempt to break out of the camp-- We had another uncle in a partisan group in the forest. They were smuggling weapons into the camp. My father remained in the camp as the head of an attempt to break out, and his attempt was betrayed. And the letter said that he was tortured and then shot in town. My mother cried. She tried not to cry when I was there, of course, and to hold some of her feelings in.

 

Eventually, it got too cold up in the attic. The attic was open to the outside. There were holes in it, and we couldn't survive another Ukrainian winter. We moved down to a storeroom on the first floor, a room about maybe 8 x 10ft. By now, we were five. My uncle had come in from the forest. And in that room, we lifted up some of the floorboards. We dug out some of the earth to build a bunker, a hiding place, because occasionally police came to the schoolhouse. We dug out this place, so we could go in there and hide in the worst times. And then, the floorboards would be moved over and a cupboard moved over that I still remember the smell of the wet earth, it's something you don't forget. 

 

We stayed in there. And all this time, I felt enveloped by a, what I would call, a cocoon of love. There was this tremendous love around me, even as there was this terrible danger out there. Eventually, the Russians came back driving Studebaker trucks. We could hear the artillery in the distance. The offensive had stalled not too far from the town and from where we were. And one day, it was also a night in June 1944. This is a long time before the war ended in Europe, but this is when were freed by the Red Army. We walked out from that schoolhouse and walked across muddy clay fields after rain. My mother carried me. 

 

I was seven at this point. The two women supported the men. The men's legs were swollen from lack of motion. We walked across to the German lines, where a soldier gave us a ride on his truck into town. I could see some of the German bodies lying in the road. We were refugees in Europe then for a while. We left Poland. My mother remarried after the war, and I then had a sister born already in this country. We came to this country. We lived happily ever after. 

 

In 2006, five years ago, my sister and I and my son Hillel, who is named as my father was Hillel, went back to that village and to the town. The schoolhouse was still there, and the attic was still there. The schoolhouse was expanded and rebuilt, but the attic was still there. We climbed into the attic. It was very important that my son be there, because at the point that we climbed into that attic, he had a five-year-old, my grandson Sam. And so, as I watched my son, as we touched hands, I could feel that he knew what it meant to be a five-year-old shut in that attic.

 

We climbed down and wanted to see the place where the storeroom was. But the school had been rebuilt. The storeroom had been rebuilt into a classroom. Then, I look at this classroom, and on the wall is Mendeleev's periodic table of the elements. Now, I'm a chemist. I became a chemist almost by accident. I'm a good chemist. [audience laughter] It took my mother 25 years old to get over the fact that I didn't become a real doctor. [audience laughter] I look around this room, and there's some chemical equipment, and there is some more stuff on the walls about acids and bases. And this same room in which we had been hidden 62 years before that was now a chemistry classroom.

 

Now, there were in this town altogether 4,000 Jews, 4,000 Poles, 4,000 Ukrainians. Of the 4,000 Jews, maybe 200 survived the war, four children among them. Those children are all in the United States. We had done well. But what about those hundreds and hundreds of children who had not survived, who did not or even have that cocoon of love to hold them together, whose deaths were solitary? Who will tell their stories? Who will speak for the dead?