110503 SURVIVAL: SELLING BLACKMARKET CIGARETTES

YOM HASHOAH 2011: IN MEMORY OF YURIK

by Ruth Lichtenstein

In August 1942, the Germans began liquidating the ghettos around Warsaw, among them the ghetto of Otwock. At that time, my grandfather, Reb Eliezer Yischok Mostovitz, Hy’d, who was then only thirty-eight years old, was caught carrying a sefer Torah and was immediately deported to Treblinka, where he perished. For many years I longed to find out additional details of his capture and deportation, but of course there was no one to ask.

Eventually, I contacted Dr. Nili Keren in Israel who told me to get in touch with Yurik Plonsky from Mishmar HaEmek, a secular kibbutz in Israel. My family and I visited Yurik on Succot the following year, and he told me his story.

His father sat and learned Torah while his mother took care of the family’s material needs. As soon as the Jews of Otwock were forced into a ghetto, Yurik’s mother sewed for her ten-year old son a body belt with many secret compartments, filled them with bits of meat, and sent him by tram, under cover of darkness, to the Warsaw Ghetto, about a 45-minute ride away. Once in the ghetto, Yurik sold the meat since there was precious little meat to be had in the city. In this way, he kept his family alive. Never during the more than two years that Yurik trafficked in meat did he question why he was forced to face such danger.

One day, when he was near his Bar Mitzvah, Yurik’s father told him that he needed his help in Warsaw. Word had gotten out that the ghetto in Otwock was about to be liquidated and they needed Yurik’s help to rescue the seven sefer Torahs in their boarded-up shul. To accomplish this, Yurik climbed a tree that grew near the shul, jumped onto the shul’s roof, made his way down two floors, removed a sefer Torah, tied it to his body with rope, climbed back up to the roof, jumped down from the roof onto the tree, scrambled down to the ground and handed the Torah scroll to one of the Jews hiding nearby. Yurik did this six times successfully. But on his seventh trip, as he climbed down the tree with the last sefer Torah, he heard noise and realized that the Nazis had caught wind of what was afoot and had arrived.

Frightened, he quickly untied the Torah from his body and handed it to a Jew whose outstretched arms lovingly received it. And as Yurik finished his story, I finally knew why my grandfather had been captured and the mitzvah in which he had been involved in those final hours.

Yurik escaped that night and fled to Bialystok where he took refuge in the Warsaw Ghetto and became a vendor selling black-market cigarettes. A number of Jewish boys disguised themselves as Polish boys and stealthily smuggled themselves out of the Warsaw Ghetto and into the Aryan side to sell the goods.

Yurik survived the war, immigrated to Israel and became a kibbutznik. Sorrowfully, many years later, he lost his son in one of Israel’s wars of defense. Yurik passed away only a few months ago.