32 PARTISAN REVIEW
revolution. For them, Hitler's enemies at the time-France and Eng–
land-were first of all bulwarks of working-class oppression.
The fact remains that Grandfather Wolf stayed in Odessa. He refused
to leave behind a sick woman, with whom he'd lived little more than a
year. I feel that by forsaking his own life for the sake of another person,
my grandfather made a sacrifice that, on the scales of fate, outweighed
everything else. Grandfather stayed with the woman, stayed till the end
of his days, to the last nail in his coffin, as the expression goes . Coffins,
though, were not in question then. Even to know in which common
grave one's own person would lie was sheer luck.
Two versions of how Grandfather perished have come down to me–
one more horrifying than the other.
My cousin Eva heard that the Germans tortured our grandfather the
same way they tortured the captured Red Army's genera l Karbyshev.
Soviet newspapers often described the general's suffering. The Nazis
learned that he couldn't tolerate the cold. They took him out in severe
frost, tied him to a tree, and poured co ld water over him till he became
one giant icicle.
No matter how honorable such a death would have been for my
grandfather-he would be likened, at least in suffering, to the famed
Russian general-I doubt this version. It's difficult to believe that the
Nazis would devote so much attention to a pious, totally civilian, old
Jew. Why bother so much to kill one "lousy yid"? From what I know
about how they finished off the Jews in Odessa, they rarely had to even
spend their ammunition on such a trifling business. People perished
from hunger, cold, typhus, diarrhea, gangrene, and pneumonia. With
one strike of a rifle butt, the Germans would finish off those who fell
and couldn't get up.
Then there is Mama's story about how Grandfather Wolf met his last
hour. It happened somewhere along the road to Lustdorf, the German
colony near Odessa. The Romanian guards herded him, along with
twenty-eight thousand other Jews, into artillery warehouses and set
them on fire. The machine gunners surrounded it and waited till the last
walls collapsed so that none of the women, children, and old men would
be able to slip out.
There were, however, many other possibilities. I read an eyewitness
account of the fate of Odessa Jews by David Starodinsky. As a youth he
went through all the circles of this hell and, by several miracles, man–
aged to stay alive. Thanks to him, I can see clearly how my grandfather
might have perished. Most likely, his fate was that of most Odessa Jews.
Before the troops, mostly Romanian, sent them to the death camp, they
