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    Zalman Ber: The True Story of the Man the Nazis Could Not Kill
    Zalman Ber: The True Story of the Man the Nazis Could Not Kill
    Zalman Ber: The True Story of the Man the Nazis Could Not Kill
    Ebook111 pages1 hour

    Zalman Ber: The True Story of the Man the Nazis Could Not Kill

    By Lisa Mishler

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    About this ebook

    Zalman Ber's story, told in his own voice, is a powerful addition to the historical recountings of World War II. Together, he and his wife, Luba, survived the Holocaust. They escaped the horrors the Nazis inflicted on their Polish villages. They fought with partisans. Then later, Zalman enlisted with the Russian military.

    Their story is about love, war, heroism, and miracles. It is a testament to their resiliency and capacity not just to survive, but to flourish and rise above tremendous adversity. Love, courage, and a sheer force of will drove Luba during her long journey to find Zalman, alone, in one of the coldest winters in recorded history while being surrounded by Nazi soldiers. Luba with her sensitivity influenced Zalman when, time and time again, he should have been killed and was not. Their story deserves to be experienced and honored.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPublication Consultants
    Release dateNov 15, 2016
    ISBN9781594336713
    Zalman Ber: The True Story of the Man the Nazis Could Not Kill
    Author

    Lisa Mishler

    Lisa Kotz Mishler, the daughter of Holocaust survivors and heroes Sol and Luba Kotz, grew up hearing stories of her parent's life in Poland during World War II. As a professional painter working primarily in oils, acrylics and watercolors, those stories began to influence her work. Her first book, L'Chayim - To Life, is a collection of paintings and narration inspired by her parents harrowing and miraculous journey in Poland before emigrating to the United States. Lisa's work has been shown in the Louvre in Paris, as well as in galleries in the United States. You can learn more about her at www.lisamishler.com.

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      Book preview

      Zalman Ber - Lisa Mishler

      Kotz

      PREFACE

      By now most people of the WWII generation have heard of the crematoriums of Dachau, Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. Yet, it should be known that more Jewish people met their deaths at the hands of the Nazi Gestapo and their stooges in the local ghettos, in towns and villages, in the same barbaric destruction as the well known concentration camps.

      Most of the three million Jewish population of Poland, and a million and a half in the western part of Russia, had been liquidated in mass killings in the ghettos, in places where they were born.

      Sol Kotz

      November 1976

      So I’m living now in Scottsdale, Arizona.

      Very nice. Very Successful. Buying and selling scrap metal. But big not like before. Now is airplanes from the government. Things like that. A respectable

      Businessman. Like the dream.

      A few years ago, my son, born in America, gone in a car crash.

      Then my wife, from cancer. Gone. Both. After everything.

      And me, I go on. Not for the dream. But for the others. The ones gone. And the ones to come yet. I have a daughter and a younger son. Good to me. Loves me. Both. So I go on. Even today. Because I am remembering. Because I can’t forget. And because all of this time is not for nothing.

      There is still tomorrow…

      L’Chyaim – To Life

      Our brother Sheldon died in a tragic automobile accident on July 18, 1969 at the age of 18.

      Luba, born April 27, 1921, died April 19, 1972.

      Sol, born August 13, 1921, died November 8th, 1994

      January 1936

      "Z

      alman! Get up! Your father is leaving. You’ll be late."

      I pull the covers over my head. Already I can hear the people saying, Here comes Sol with the little white horse. Maybe if I stay in bed, the day will go away without me. Now is winter. Forty or fifty degrees below zero. I am buried in my blanket. I try not to think of the white horse standing in his stall behind the house, but it doesn’t work. Always he is there. Shivering. Waiting. Even with my eyes closed under the covers I can still see him. He is alone, cold. I hate him, but still I have feeling for him. I bought him when I was fifteen, and then he was already old and ugly. Now he has big belly. But he knows all the roads and the frozen lakes. I can fall asleep on the wagon and he takes me where I want to go. He always wakes me up by jolting the wagon to a stop. A bastard. He is a bastard, this white horse. I told him so. Then was the time that he kicked me in the face. So now, we have an understanding. He does his job, and I do mine. But we never speak. Not anymore.

      I have to drive through town before daylight. I don’t want anybody to see me. Especially my close friends. I am ashamed. Not for what I am, but for what I do—what my profession is. First of all, at fifteen, I’m not a bad looking boy. I always dress clean, like somebody who comes from a real nice family. Good reputation. Solid, I would say, like a gentleman. And I am the best student in my class. The other boys have to come to me if they need to find out something. Everything is lighter in school for me than for anybody else, even though I go to school where all the rich boys go. Though my father can’t afford it, he knows it feeds my appetite for learning. Then, when I am twelve it’s finished.

      It’s getting late, so I get up. I have to fill the sleigh with my boxes. Rags, needles, scarves and pig bristles. This is what I have instead of school. Some good things to know in the world for a boy. Soft pig bristles sell for less than the real stiff ones. A fat pig, he has harder bristles. So bristles from a fat pig bring more money than from a thin one. Me, the best student. I’m a peddler. I’ll always be a peddler. It’s what I do.

      My father doesn’t have a license to be a peddler. He was beaten by the Polish police. He never recovered. Always, he is shaking. Like my horse, but not from the cold. I was there when they beat him. Five policemen pounded him with sticks. He yelled at me to stay out of it. Afterward, he never went out again. But each morning I hear my ­mother’s voice hurrying me to be ready to leave with him. But he stays home, and I travel alone. He was made into a dead thing, my father, because he didn’t have a license to peddle.

      He watches from the window when I go out in the cold. And he doesn’t say nothing. Not even to the horse. My father got papers to go to the United States, but the officials in Warsaw refused him to go. My mother was pregnant with me. My family had traveled four hundred miles to get to Warsaw. They were told the United Jewish Appeal immigration law does not accept pregnant women to travel to the U.S. When he could still speak, he used to say to me, I wish to hell you never was born. Now, he doesn’t speak, and I don’t listen. Time made me deaf to him. The police made him silent. This man was made to go to America. And I am his curse. Except for me, his life would have been different. Time amounts to nothing. All this time. Now he just stays home. Always he watches me leave. His silence screams after me a curse. Only one thing more. Sometimes, when we are alone, he sits on the floor and lets me comb his hair. And together we say only nothing.

      Our town is called Glembokoye. It means deep valley. It is a beautiful town surrounded by woods. Beautiful thick woods on all sides. In our valley there is much trading. In winter, we are a center for cattle and pigs. Glembokoye has one of the largest slaughterhouses in Poland. From all over Germany cattlemen come to buy livestock.

      Our home is a one-story house. Little better than average for our town. Built of logs with clay in between, we burn wood in the oven for heating, for cooking and baking bread. Our oven heats the entire house, even when the temperature outside is forty degrees below zero, like today. The money my father’s sister was supposed to spend for the trip to America, she sent it to us when they refused us the permission. Before I was born. A thousand dollars, I think. And my father built this house with the money. With the thousand dollars. I was his curse.

      I remember from the beginning my mother carrying two buckets with handles attached to an oxbow across her shoulders. She brings water from the well, about three hundred feet away. Eighteen, twenty buckets. About ten trips to feed the cow and the horses. We have two horses, my brother and me. And a cow, chickens, and a little garden. My mother wakes up in the early morning to work, before we are awake. Then, Zalman! she calls. She feeds us our breakfast, and gives us our milk. Every day of her life, always the same.

      After about a year, I am too ashamed to go on like this. So, I quit with the wagon and start to work for somebody in a store. To be a sales clerk, selling iron and hardware. And I don’t need a horse. No more am I peddler.

      I know what I like to do, and I can do it, but I am not good at taking orders from anyone. I resent taking orders. I am always too ambitious, too serious. You see what I mean? Finally, I quit the job and go to work for somebody else. Another junk dealer. I work for him and stay there a couple of months. I don’t like him either. I go to my uncle, my father’s brother, and borrow a hundred dollars to start a business of my own. More like a dealer myself. I am my boss. He takes me in his horse and buggy. We go to the cities to buy for cash. We buy junk. Skins from the sheep. More hair from pigs. It is a nice business. A respectable business. I pick up my goods from the week, take them over and sell them. He pays me, my uncle. If I don’t make enough, he just loans me back the hundred dollars. Anybody in this business is already respected, a respectable businessman.

      Then Germany declares war on Poland in 1939. The Russians come to occupy Glembokoye. I think this is to help keep the Germans out,

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