Sidney Simon, a Partisan, Returns to Belize
simon-sidney.m4aIn 1925, Sidney Simon was born in Belitze, Poland, now part of Belarus. Sidney’s parents, Samuel and Czerna, had five children: three boys, Mojshe, Sidney, Richard, and two girls, Katie and Ida. Sidney’s father, Samuel, owned a restaurant and a liquor store. His mother, Czerna, was a very good, hard-working woman who helped his father and even had her own business, buying shoes and boots and selling them from their home.
In June 1941, when the Nazis invaded Belitze, Poland, they terrorized the Jews and eventually put the family in a ghetto. Sidney’s older brother, Mojshe, along with a group of twenty-one young men, escaped from the ghetto into the woods, where Mojshe became a partisan. A short time later, the Nazis decided to liquidate the ghetto, so the rest of the family fled into the woods.
Sidney then became a partisan and later was recruited by the Istrabitilsky Battalion, killing Germans retreating from Russia and at the same time revenging the murder of his brother. He also fought Germans when he was drafted into the Soviet army.
After the war, Sidney was in a displaced persons camp until he and his family immigrated to the United States. In the United States, Sidney met Rosalie, whom he married in 1950. Eventually the couple moved to Atlantic City where Sidney developed a number of businesses, including real estate. Sidney and Rosalie now live in Margate and have three children and four grandchildren.
Sidney and Rosalie went back to Belitze twice in the 80s and 90s. On both trips to Belitze Sidney was reminded that the Holocaust affected perpetrators and their children, as well as Holocaust survivors and their children. He tells the following story to explain this:
In our town, a shoemaker, named Sheshko, and his family had made a good living before 1941 when the Germans occupied Belitze. But in early 1942, when the Jews were sent to the Žetel Ghetto, Sheshko and his family left everything they had with their neighbor, Kulesh, a Christian friend. This friend said that he would keep the family’s possessions safe until the war ended.
When the Germans made the Žetel Ghetto Judenrein (free of Jews), the Sheshkos escaped to the Kulesh’s home. Kulesh said, “Yes, I will hide you and your family in my stable. I will feed you. And after the war, you will be freed.” While the family hid in the stable, their friend rode on horseback to the Germans and reported them. The Germans came and captured the family. They took them to the church, tortured, and shot the whole family.
When we were in the partisans, we knew about this man, Kulesh. One night a group of partisans went to Kulesh’s house, asking him to show them how to get to a certain place. They took the man onto the cable ferry (a boat pulled from shore to shore by a cable and wench set-up) and pulled it to the middle of the River Neman, beat him up, gouging out his eyes. Then they took rocks, attaching them to both his feet and dropping him in the river.
When we were back in Belitze the first time, Rosalie and I wanted to visit the Jewish cemetery. We saw an old man in a horse and wagon with milk cans on the back. I stopped him and asked him for directions to the cemetery. He said, “I live near the cemetery.” We followed him to the cemetery, introducing ourselves. After we visited the cemetery, we saw the man come out of his house and he approached us. He said, “Partisans came in and took my father because they thought he had reported the Sheshko family to the Germans. This is not so! A neighbor saw the family and he reported them. So the partisans took my father away. I don’t even know where his bones are.” He then said, “I have one question. I heard that one of Sheshko’s sons is alive. Do you know if Hyme Sheshko is alive?” I said, “Sure. He’s alive.” I wanted the son to worry about Hyme avenging his father.
Even forty-five years and more after the Holocaust, what people did still affects their families.
The second time we visited Belitze, we again went to the cemetery. An old woman, the wife of Kulesh’s son, came out of this same house near the cemetery. We watched her and she went to a garden she had planted in the cemetery. She was picking cucumbers. I asked her, “Do you know these are graves? Do you have permission to plant here?” She said, “I am part of a cooperative. I don’t know from nothing.” I told her, “I’ll tell the Russians what you are doing.”
After the Jews from Belitze were destroyed and their culture vanished, this non-Jewish woman still has no respect for the Jewish dead, desecrating the graves in the Jewish cemetery. She and her husband seem only to worry about what they have lost not about what their neighbors lost in that time of terror.
However, many in Belitze did welcome us, greeting us with bread and salt, the symbols of welcome.
Sidney Simon’s memoir, Among the Birches of Belarus: A Partisan Youth’s Revenge, will be published in 2009. To learn more about partisans see the film Defiance to be released December 12, 2008.
