Prologue
A Wedding in Brooklyn
In the New York City Clerk’s archive there are 1,049 lined ledger pages dutifully cataloging Brooklyn’s newlyweds in 1953. Somewhere among the marriage certificate numbers and the columns of dates recorded in looping black scrawl are the names of a couple who said “I do” on a May afternoon in a small catering hall in one of the borough’s Jewish enclaves.
Their wedding was the flashpoint of multiple time lines—an event that determined the course of more than a dozen lives and upon which at least one fated love story hangs. Which is why it’s all the more curious that, at least in this specific sense, the bride and groom are inconsequential. Their role in this story is merely a footnote; even their names have long been forgotten. Far more remarkable is who attended their wedding and the extraordinary thing that occurred between them.
Among the newlyweds’ reception guests that day was a young Yeshiva University student named Philip Lazowski. Morning after morning, this dark-haired young man with his compact build and bookish intensity hopped on the subway from Brooklyn and rode it all the way up to Manhattan’s West 185th Street to attend classes, only to make the return trip back to the Flatbush Avenue station so he could take night courses at Brooklyn College. Though he had been in New York for nearly five years, the twenty-three-year-old immigrant with a halting accent hadn’t adjusted to his new life in the United States.
Reluctant to attend this spring wedding of his fellow Yeshiva student, Philip drifted uncomfortably through the crowd of American twentysomethings sashaying around him in their sports jackets and crinoline skirts. When music filled the hall and partygoers rose to join the newlyweds on the dance floor, Philip, ill at ease in his borrowed suit, stayed seated at his table. So did a young woman with raven-swept hair and bright brown eyes occupying the chair next to his. They started talking and discovered they had much in common. Her name was Gloria and she was also taking night courses at Brooklyn College. She was from a small town in Poland, as was Philip. And like him, Gloria had escaped Nazi slaughter by fleeing to the Bialowieza Forest to live alongside the partisan fighters in the woods.
When Gloria heard that Philip was from a village called Bilitza, her lovely face lit up. “I know a woman who once saved a boy from Bilitza,” she told him. The woman was the mother of her friend, a girl she’d met in a refugee camp in Italy, who was now living in Connecticut. In fact, she had just been to see them. “Only the woman doesn’t know if the boy survived,” Gloria said.
“How did she save him?” Philip wanted to know.
Gloria told him the story of how her friend’s mother had risked her own life and the safety of her two young daughters to keep the boy from death during the first ghetto massacre in Zhetel.
As he listened, Philip’s heart began to pound—he already knew this story. “That was me,” he told her. “I am that boy.”
A few minutes later, Philip was racing down a flight of stairs to the pay phone in the catering hall basement. Excitement buzzed through him as he dialed the operator while the wedding party whirled on above.
The operator’s voice sounded in his ear. After he deposited the correct change for the long-distance call, she asked who he was trying to reach. “Rabinowitz,” he replied. But there were six Rabinowitz residences listed in Hartford. What, she asked, did he want her to do?
Philip felt around inside his pocket—there weren’t enough coins to pay for a second call. He took a deep breath. “Try the first one,” he told her.
The line rang.
A woman answered.
It was her—Miriam Rabinowitz, the woman who had saved him. He’d found her at last.
* * *
Weddings are life-affirming rituals with a hopeful view of the future implicit in their ceremonies. But they are also bridges between individuals, families, and formative years. So it is fitting that this serendipitous encounter should have transpired at a wedding.
Even then, in 1953, nearly a decade after World War II officially came to a close, there were still some people for whom a Jewish union like this one would be viewed as something of a marvel. The world had just emerged from one of the darkest periods in modern history, collectively having to rebuild on the loss of some sixty million lives. Of the six million European Jews killed in the Holocaust, three million were from Poland. By 1950, only 45,000 of the more than three million Jews counted in Poland in 1933 remained. An even smaller percentage of those who fled to the Belorussian woods survived.
As if fortune needed to signal just how powerful its hand had been in reuniting Philip Lazowski with Miriam Rabinowitz, on May 23, 1953, just one week after that wedding, Gloria Koslowski, the captivating brunette from the Brooklyn reception, was killed by a drunk driver while crossing Pitkin Avenue. Her death in any shape would have been tragic: that an intelligent, vibrant young woman should be robbed of her hard-won existence on a rain-slick street in Brooklyn more than four thousand miles away from where she had outrun the Nazis was a senseless death, devoid of any natural symmetry or justice.
But Gloria’s life would still give way to new life. She would become both the connective thread between two families and the seed from which a third would grow—all because she reunited the boy from Bilitza with the woman who saved him.
There are many stories of love and survival from the Holocaust, stories of extraordinary perseverance and bravery that defy all fathomable depths of human endurance. Many of them have twists of fate, and there are even a few with miraculously happy endings.
They are the great love stories of a terrible time—and this is one of them.
CHAPTER 1
A Wedding in Vilna
In the end, it was a beautiful wedding.
Even if, according to the bride and groom’s parents, the occasion was long overdue and perhaps, for their sophisticated hosts, the event was a touch slapdash. Fortunately, there was far more to celebrate than there were reasons to complain. Not the least of which was the venue, a grand apartment in a posh Vilna neighborhood, a city that was no doubt flush with cosmopolitan allure for a young provincial couple exploring its delights in 1933.
It was actually the young lovers’ second attempt at a marriage ceremony. The first try for a romantic but no-frills elopement came to a panicked halt when the bride abruptly changed her mind. Game as she had been to buck tradition, and with it a Jewish ceremony—prepared even to be married by Vilna goyim—her whole being had rejected the scene around them at the Vilna courthouse. No, she thought, I cannot get married like this. Waiting in front of them in the long, colorful line of besotted couples was a man wearing a hat with the brim tilted in a smug slant across his forehead. “Like a gangster!” the scandalized bride would later scoff. The groom, perhaps registering the look on his future wife’s face, took his cue and raised no protest. The wedding was put off.
But rather than leave Vilna unwed, the couple was rescued by the groom’s well-to-do relatives. The ceremony and reception took place at Number 8 Daichishe Road, at the home of Saul and Batsheva Rabinowitz. Saul was the owner of not one but two lucrative textile businesses and this, their luxurious city home, was staffed by no fewer than two maids and a nanny for their two young boys.
The wedding, an intimate affair, numbered guests in the twenties. In addition to family, the couple’s circle of friends, already in Vilna for the city’s annual fair, comprised the majority of celebrators. The ceremony was simple—the young Jewish couple made their vows and then, as it was a Saturday, enjoyed a small Kiddush before the splendid supper was served. The elaborate feast of fish and meat was procured by the bride’s father and prepared by the groom’s mother.
A young woman liberated for her time, the twenty-four-year-old bride eschewed at least one principal wedding tradition: the white dress. Instead, she wore a long black evening gown; her rippling curls, dark and thick, framed her small oval face in a fashionable bob. Standing six feet tall—nearly a foot higher than his betrothed and large enough to fill a doorframe—was the groom. At twenty-five, his dark hair, which he was fond of slicking back and to the side, was already beginning a gentle retreat into two narrow peaks. Above a generous nose his brown eyes shone warmly; he was mad for the spitfire at his side.
It was September 30, 1933, and Miriam Dworetsky and Morris Rabinowitz were married at last.
* * *
The day Miriam Dworetsky finally chose an eligible suitor from a good Jewish family must have come as no small relief to her father, Gutel Dworetsky, who had himself been a widower for more than two decades. His wife, Rochel, died during labor with their fourth child. Delivery complications claimed the lives of both mother and baby, leaving Gutel, who was still a relatively young man in 1913, with three small children—Miriam, five; a son, Beryl, three; and finally Luba, who was just one.
Intent on devoting himself fully to his bereaved young family, Gutel vowed never to marry again. For a man of his time, this was something of an outwardly peculiar decision. Gutel was financially comfortable; he owned homes in both Novogrudek and Zhetel, neighboring towns that, at the time, were still under Russian rule. Taking a new wife appeared both personally and parentally practical. But Gutel was of the mind that his children would be scarred by the sudden presence of an unfamiliar woman and was seemingly content avoiding the business of a new marriage. Still, he wasn’t prepared to raise a family alone, so Gutel’s niece Itka came to the Dworetsky family home in Novogrudek to help with the children.
Itka, the daughter of Gutel’s sister, was too young to be a spinster, but presumably old enough that her family determined her own marital prospects were lacking. This was likely because Itka, as the family delicately put it, was simpleminded. In whatever ways she was limited, Itka was equal to the task of caretaker to her young cousins and slipped into the role of their surrogate mother. What Itka thought of the arrangement was never really clear but enough could be gleaned through the happiness of the children she helped to raise, who, despite growing up in the murky shadow of Rochel’s death, never felt they were without a mother.
Gutel was a religious if not strictly devout man. The Dworetsky family observed the Jewish holidays and their corresponding rituals and traditions. Every year without fail, he would take the children to synagogue for the Yizkor memorial services in remembrance of their departed mother. As they got a little older, Miriam and Luba became aware of how the congregants’ glances lingered over them; they noticed how elderly women’s eyes welled with tears watching their widower father and his motherless children. But their pity baffled the girls. “What are they crying for?” they whispered to each other. They understood they had no mother, but their father was doting, Itka was always with them. What, they wondered, could they be missing?
Of the children, only Miriam remembered Rochel. But as time passed, her mother’s form and figure faded even further until all that remained with tactical clarity were scattered scenes from the funeral, the feeling of hands and arms lifting her up so she could see above the mourners. But even those memories were devoid of the palpable sting of loss; the connection to Rochel became ever more remote. Whether Miriam was ultimately the product of a too-lenient single father or if she had inherited her self-guiding streak from her mother was something no one, least of all Miriam, could ever really be sure of. But the elder Dworetsky daughter, who made a regular habit of defying convention, would soon provide her father with plenty to worry about.
As a young woman, Miriam didn’t possess stereotypical, head-turning feminine attributes. Her pointed features and diminutive size, paired with the contemporary styles—the cropped finger wave hairdos and the shapeless dresses with their hanging forms—deprived Miriam of the womanly shape that time and future tailoring trends would reveal. Miriam’s dark gray eyes and fair complexion matched against her deep brown hair gave her face a muted polish. When Miriam posed for photos her face would set in an almost grim expression that belied the high-spirited nature within. She may not have been a classic beauty, but Miriam’s lively personality, her beguiling laugh, gave her an irresistible zing.
By the time she was a teenager, Miriam had become a popular and outgoing girl. Called Manya by most everyone who knew her, she was active in local Zionist youth organizations, where she enjoyed fast friendships and her own opinions. Miriam was easy to laugh. Her friends liked to say she was the perfect audience for a joke—any joke. “Just show Manya two fingers, and she laughs,” they teased. Light of heart but hardly frivolous, Miriam also excelled at academics and went to work in a local drugstore after graduating from high school. Always a careful study, she quickly learned how to handle prescriptions from the shop owner, Mr. Lazarofski.
One day, Miriam overheard the local inspector telling Mr. Lazarofski that one of the small patent medicine shops in the neighboring town of Zhetel had closed, meaning that the space would be available to a new proprietor. The idea for her future hatched right then and there.
Patent medicine shops weren’t pharmacies exactly, but rather places where people could get things like soaps, vitamins, salves, and other over-the-counter remedies. Strictly speaking, patent medicine shops weren’t allowed to carry medications—it was illegal for prescriptions to be filled by anyone other than a certified pharmacist—but the practice was an accepted enough convention. Many shop owners had a little hiding room, and as long as they were smart enough to keep the medications out of sight, the inspectors limited their reprimands. Still, Zhetel only allowed a few of these stores at any given time, so permission to occupy and operate such a business had to be approved by the local council. Miriam wasted no time getting to Zhetel to present her petition, and soon the proper paperwork was arranged and the little shop was hers.
* * *
Gutel either relented to his daughter’s plans, or more likely had never been asked permission. There’s no reason to think that by then Miriam Dworetsky was anything other than her own woman.
It was sometime in 1927 that twenty-year-old Miriam packed up her things and left the family home in Novogrudek, striking out on her own for Zhetel on little more than a few borrowed zlotys from her father and the steam of her own gumption.
Her determination was tested before she even opened her shop doors. The drugstore business was something of a family-wide trade, and when an uncle in Lida offered Miriam inventory from his store’s supply to help her get going, she accepted without hesitation. It didn’t take long for her to discover that he’d sold her expired medications, leaving her with useless goods and a hefty dent in her seed money.
Her early career was further hampered by an already crowded market. Given the community’s small size, the few nearby shops were all in competition to secure the lion’s share of local business as well as the nearby farms and neighboring small towns. One of the other stores’ proprietors was another relation, an older cousin of Miriam’s who wasted no time in launching his campaign to outsell her, bringing his brazen tactics right to her doorstep. Waiting in the street, he would trail after her customers, angling to see what they’d purchased. If it was medicine, he would lean in, a sly conspirator, and ask, “How much did you pay? I’ll give it to you for cheaper.”
Miriam refused to be rattled. The people in Zhetel quickly came to rely on “the Dworetska woman,” as they called her, trusting how confidently she handled her medicines and wares. She was so successful, in fact, that the other patent medicine shop owner in Zhetel, Hinke Merskeh, was forced to shutter her own business for good. And when the older woman approached Miriam and offered to sell her the remainder of her stock for a song, Miriam was jaded just enough to refuse her.
* * *
Assuming that Gutel was proud of how quickly his daughter established herself as a successful business owner, he couldn’t overlook that she was still an unattached young woman, living by herself. So, after some investigation in Novogrudek, he went to Zhetel with a proposal for his wayward daughter, a plan to acquire the one thing that could shift her life into respectable place: a husband.
“Manya, listen,” he broached, hedging toward his point. “I’ve heard about a very good shadchan.” He had done his homework, he said, and this matchmaker’s reputation was of the highest caliber.
Miriam laughed her easy laugh. “Papa, I’m not going to marry through a shadchan.” And that was possibly the very last time Gutel shared his opinions on how his daughter should run her life. Miriam may have been more ambition-driven than many of her female contemporaries, but she had also cultivated a healthy recreational life. She was universally well liked among her social circle, mostly comprised of members of Hashomer Hatzair, a Socialist Zionist youth movement. She regularly hosted their informal meet-ups, as well as the after-parties, in the back room of her Zhetel shop, where she also lived. It was the ideal location—free from the eyes and judgment of parents, where they could let loose their independence in all its many forms.
When it came to men, Miriam never fell short of options. Of all the eager bachelors with their eyes on Miriam, perhaps none would regret the bungling of his pursuit more than Leibel Neski. Active in the same Zionist organization, Leibel was a few years older than the other members, and perhaps it was his age that buoyed his confidence enough to give Miriam his undivided attention during these gatherings, where he made his intentions toward her clear. But though she had no trouble enjoying company, sadly for Leibel, Miriam never took his advances seriously.
He would certainly rue the evening he decided to bring along a friend to a meeting at Miriam’s. The younger tagalong—who was endowed with the elusive trifecta of being irrefutably tall, dark, and handsome—worked with Leibel at the Zhetel lumber mill. His name was Morris Rabinowitz.
Even in his early twenties, Morris wasn’t just a tall man but a sizable one, with large hands and fingers as thick as sausage links. In a tailored suit, tie, and hat, he was easy to spot in a crowd and not just because he stood shoulders above it. Whether a flat cap or fedora, the hats Morris wore never rested quite as low on his head as they seemed to do on other men. Instead, the brims sat slightly aloft, as if they couldn’t quite manage the job of covering his manly brow; but there wasn’t one he didn’t pull off with unmistakable swagger.
If Morris attracted instant attention with his dimensions, he also had no trouble holding an audience. Morris was something of a genial carouser; he loved a good card game and crowd, and he especially enjoyed taking in local sports. Eventually, he would develop an appetite for cultural indulgences like Italian opera, indicating that beneath all his small-town bravado lay more sensitive inclinations. Despite having never finished high school, Morris was sharp-witted and shrewd, and he had a knack for cultivating trusts and friendships with people of all sorts by operating on confidence and easy charm. His was the kind of ambition that, paired with the right opportunity, was poised to pop like a champagne cork.
The moment Leibel walked Morris in Miriam’s direction marked the end of possibility for the rest of her suitors. She’d found the man for her, and she felt it in her bones before Morris had even said hello. As Miriam herself would later describe their introduction, it was simply “love at first sight.”
* * *
Morris wasn’t a member of the Hashomer Hatzair and had very little interest in officially joining the group. But when Miriam invited him to come back for another meeting he obliged. And then another, and another. And so began two years of unhurried courtship.
Their slow start was due in part to the fact that shortly after they met, Morris left to serve a brief stint in the Polish army. But his time away didn’t keep their feelings from building, and when Morris came back, the two quickly reignited their romance. Soon he was visiting Miriam at her shop every evening. The couple carried on like this happily for many months. Matrimony was set not aside but ahead for some undetermined point in the future.
It was an attitude that soon exhausted their families’ more traditional expectations.
“What are you waiting for?” Morris’s parents, the well-established Zhetel couple Berl and Beyla Rabinowitz, wanted to know. Still, Morris and Miriam would not be rushed.
In 1933, a fire ravaged Zhetel, leaving half the town in charred ruins. Like many small, forest-adjacent villages, Zhetel was essentially an intricate labyrinth of timber. And like so many others in the Novogrudek province, it was regularly plagued with fires, big and small, that gnawed their way through the tightly packed streets, jumping from one wooden home to the next before the modestly equipped fire brigades could intervene. Sadly, this particular blaze destroyed Berl and Beyla’s house.
The Rabinowitzes moved quickly to rebuild their home. The process of putting it back together, piece by piece, seemed to trigger a deeper stirring in the older couple—perhaps having learned a harsh lesson in life’s fragility. Berl and Beyla began their appeals for marriage to their son with fresh zeal. The room for acceptable delay had run out. “Why are you carrying on like this?” they demanded. “Enough is enough.”
In the face of this renewed pressure, Morris and Miriam finally marched their way to the altar and had their Vilna wedding. If their extended (presumed) engagement had been unconventional, their relationship also appeared to be something closer to an equal match of true individuals—a union of two strong, capable people who entered into a marriage purely for love.
It was a foundation that would have set the newlyweds up for a happy family life at any time, but for the trying circumstances ahead, it would prove something more like miraculous. Just as the life Miriam and Morris were building together was taking shape, so too were the darkening clouds gathering over a not-so-far-away country.
Newly appointed German chancellor Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party were on the precipice of unfurling their violent campaign against the Jewish people of Germany and unleashing Hitler’s plot to take over Europe: lebensraum—expansion by conquering. An early Nazi slogan for the idea that only true Aryans were entitled to the idyllic pastoral life of the countryside, Blut und Boden (blood and soil) became a popular political banner and justification for the policy of lebensraum.
Earlier that year, on April 1, 1933, Hitler had launched a Jewish boycott. For a single day, SS storm troopers marked the windowpanes of Jewish-owned German businesses with the Star of David and the word Jude, intimidating anyone who attempted to enter those shops. The fear and demoralization of this day were hard felt, and not just by the Jews in Germany. The tailstreams of the Nazi Party’s growing influence—born out of a discontent that had roiled the German populace since the end of the last great war—were twisting their way into Poland. Its fearmongering propaganda against the Jews was gaining a foothold among the Polish people and meddling in their politics.
The trouble this would eventually bring to the Rabinowitz family’s doorstep—to all the Jewish doorsteps in Poland—was still years away. For now, it was a ripe old time to be young, Jewish, and in love, and living in the town of Zhetel.
INTO THE FOREST. Copyright © 2021 by Rebecca Frankel.
