CHAPTER ELEVEN
Sokolovka Justingrad/Konela, 1919
In 1919, 2,500 Jews lived in Sokolovka Justingrad, twenty-five miles south of Stavishche, and a few hundred occupied the surrounding dorfs. Bessie Cutler, Rebecca’s youngest sister, lived with her husband, Karl, and their infant daughter in nearby Konela, a tiny village found by following the old channel two or three miles north.I
Tensions flared within the Jewish community of Sokolovka Justingrad when, just prior to Passover 1919, Alexander Kraidin, a young matzah maker, was jailed on suspicion of committing a Jewish blood libel murder.II Although the young teen was released a week later after his “victim” showed up in town alive and well, tensions did not subside.
Four months later, on August 2, 1919, a pleasant summer day, thousands of Ataman Zeleny’s men stormed into the town on horseback. They had just left Stavishche, where Rabbi Pitsie Avram had successfully negotiated face-to-face with the henchman Zeleny, thus saving the town’s Jews.
Rabbi Pinchas Rabinowitz, Sokolovka Justingrad’s spiritual leader and folk hero, promised that “as long as I live, no blood will be spilled in my town.”III When the lives of his people were miraculously spared during two prior attacks,IV Jews and Christians from the shtetl and its environs began to believe the rabbi’s promise. Many also thought that he’d placed a curse on the bandits. The murderers were determined to end the life of the revered rabbi, believing, as did the local peasantry, that as long as there was “light in his eyes,”V Rabbi Rabinowitz possessed the power, using prayer, to defeat the pogrom bandits.
A few mounted horsemen made their way to the house of the beloved Reb Pinchas’l, as he was affectionately known to Sokolovka’s Jewish community. A bandit entered the rabbi’s large courtyard, brandishing a gun. In the dining room, the pious and humble rabbi and several of his Hassidim friends were finishing their third meal of the Sabbath.VI The bandit asked which man was the rabbi: Reb Pinchas’l stood up and was shot after identifying himself.VII
The murderers’ motives were clear. Now that they had killed the seventy-six-year-old Torah-chanting rabbi, they were free to shed the blood of Sokolovka’s Jews. They then massacred the young men of the town—approximately 150 were shot by a hidden machine gun.VIII
Fortunately, Bessie, her husband, and their infant daughter were at home in Konela during the summer bloodbath.
The notorious bandit Kebe was born and raised in the nearby village of Popivka and later served in Sokolovka Justingrad’s militia.IX When a group of Jews in Sokolovka accused him of first stealing hides from them, and then selling them, he was convicted and punished for his crimes. Kebe subsequently joined the partisans and swore vengeance on all the Jews of Sokolovka.X
On his second killing spree, which took place right after Zeleny’s summer massacre, Kebe led a band of hooligans who set fire to parts of Sokolovka. He then hunted down a group of Jews who had fled the flames to nearby Konela, and murdered thirty-six of his prey, leaving their bloodied bodies sprawled out on a field by the windmills at the entrance of the tiny village. The scene of mass murder near the spinning sails of Konela’s flour mills was an unforgettable sight for the 120 Jewish families and their many friendly Christian neighbors who lived in this tiny dorf.
Among the witnesses was Channa’s youngest and favorite aunt, Bessie Cutler, who had grown up with Channa’s mother in the much smaller countryside dorf of Skibin. Their upbringing turned out to be a blessing—as with very few Jewish families in Skibin, it forced all seven of the Cutler children to pick up the language of his or her neighbors. When most Jews spoke Russian, their Yiddish accents gave them away. Peasants usually had no problem distinguishing between a Christian and a Jew. But Bessie spoke Russian fluently without an accent. In fact, when Jews from larger towns heard her speak Yiddish, they could easily detect that she had grown up in a dorf and made fun of her thick Yiddish accent. During a time when being Jewish could mean losing your life, it was a blessing that Bessie spoke Russian so well.
Not only was Bessie fluent in Russian, but with a tall, statuesque figure, blue eyes, and long golden hair, many mistook her for a Gentile. In Konela, she deliberately wore peasant-style clothing that she sewed herself in order to mingle freely and blend in among the local peasantry. When the peasant farmers boycotted selling Jews any fruit, vegetables, and chickens, they sold them to Bessie. When they would not speak freely in front of a Jew, they gladly conversed with her. When Jewish women feared for their lives as they walked down the street, the local male populace smiled pleasantly at her.
Bessie had gotten married in 1917 to a red-headed young man named Karl who adored her. Karl was born and raised in Konela, where the teenaged couple now made their home. They became parents to a beautiful baby girl and were happy with their lives until fate cruelly intervened.
At the very end of 1919, General Anton Denikin’s army, retreating from a loss in Belaya Tserkov, sent word out in Sokolovka Justingrad that they wanted to hold a meeting in a field near the river with all the Jewish men from the town. It was hinted that they wanted to talk about peace. Denikin, the commander and chief of the White forces (Russians) in the civil war against the Bolsheviks, had little control over his followers, who often committed violent pogroms against the Jews. Bessie had the advantage of being able to converse with the local peasantry. From what she had gleaned from their conversation, she was naturally suspicious about the true intentions of Denikin’s soldiers. She begged her husband not to attend and implored him to hide in their root cellar in Konela while this meeting was set to take place.
Assured that her young husband was safely in hiding, Bessie, with her infant daughter, made the long walk into Sokolovka to shop for eggs and milk at the marketplace. She was startled by a series of explosions that sounded like cannon fire: blasts continued one after another as the ground shook beneath her. They appeared to have originated from the direction near the river where the meeting was rumored to have taken place. In between the shots, she could make out the faint but heart wrenching echoes of a familiar prayer, “Sh’ma Yisrael Adonai Eloheinu Adonai Ehad.” “Hear, O Israel: the Lord is our God, the Lord is One.”XI
Cradling her young child in her arms, Bessie rushed home. When she opened the cellar door, she was certain that she would find her husband. But Karl had broken his promise to her and had gone to the meeting. Before leaving, Karl had confided in a female neighbor that he felt it was an act of cowardice to hide when all the other men in the village were attending the gathering. On what must have been pure adrenaline, Bessie ran until she reached the outskirts of the field near the river.
She could not believe the gruesome sight that greeted her. Two hundred bloodied bodies were lying before her, mangled together in the snow. The unarmed men had gathered there in hopes of making peace, but instead were ruthlessly ambushed by Denikin’s hooligans. In shock, Bessie desperately searched for her husband; she found his lifeless body dangling from a wagon. Dazed, she stood there, helpless. Bessie looked around the frozen killing field and realized that, with the exception of a few men who were tending to the bodies, she and her baby were the only ones alive. Others who had heard the gunfire and had reached the sight of the massacre just before her were murdered in the streets, shot by the bandits on horseback as they were exiting Sokolovka.
In an absolute state of shock, Bessie held on to her child for dear life and started walking. As she passed the frozen river, her boots brushed against the corpses of dozens of men who had been ambushed earlier in the day. The men had been stripped naked of their coats, clothing, shoes, and underwear by Denikin’s soldiers, who then tied the hands of their victims and bound them together. The naked men were then thrown out on the frozen river and left to freeze to death. Unable to process her thoughts, Bessie mindlessly headed toward her sister Hiya’s house, which was several miles away. She walked through the snow in the bitter cold and had no idea how long it took her to reach her sister’s house.
The first night following the massacre, Bessie woke up screaming and shaking from a vivid nightmare. “Karl came to me in my dream,” she cried to Hiya. “He told me that he wants the baby with him.” Hiya sat by her traumatized sister’s bedside until Bessie, who lovingly cradled her precious infant daughter in her arms, fell back to sleep.
A few days later, Bessie’s dream turned out to be prophetic: her seemingly healthy little girl died mysteriously.XII Within just days, Bessie had witnessed a massacre and lost both a husband and a child. Now widowed and childless, she remained under the loving and nurturing care of her older sister, who was a great comfort to her.
Channa’s youngest and sweetest aunt, an innocent victim of General Denikin’s fury, was just eighteen years old when her life came crumbling down around her.
The pogrom that took the life of Bessie Cutler’s young husband also spelled the end of the century-old shtetl.XIII