The day began beneath a murky dawn…
Each morning, leaving the roadside ditch,
A barefoot boy, forlorn and all alone,
Walked down a road of sorrows without end.
Three times he fled the threat of execution,
And wandered through the Polish countryside;
From every crack, death watched him, ever lurking,
And doggedly kept following close behind.
From Roman Levin’s poem “The Medallion”
(dedicated to Floria Budishevskaya)
Roman Levin was born on July 30, 1930, in the city of Lubny, Poltava Region. His father, Alexander, came from the shtetl of Pleshchenitsy, near Minsk. There he attended a Jewish school and, from an early age, spoke and read Yiddish. Alexander met his future wife, Serafima (Sima) Rosenblum, in Kharkiv in the mid-1920s. They were married there as well.
The family moved frequently, as Alexander’s service as a career counterintelligence officer left little room for a settled life. In the turbulent year of 1937, he was unexpectedly transferred from Kyiv to the NKVD headquarters in the city of Stalino (now Donetsk). Just a couple of weeks later, his colleagues called Sima.
“Come at once. Your husband is ill.”
“What happened?”
“He’s gone mad. He’s singing opera arias in his office!”
Sima took her husband back to Kyiv. He spent a year undergoing treatment in a psychiatric hospital, and in 1938, after recovering, resumed his service in Kuibyshev (now Samara). Roman never discussed this episode with his father, but as he grew older, he came to understand that the “illness” had most likely been caused not by overwork, but by his father’s determination to survive the bloody whirlwind of 1937.
In the autumn of 1939, after Western Belarus was incorporated into the Soviet Union, Alexander was transferred to Brest, on the country’s western border. Roman, his mother, and his older sister Tamara, who was sixteen, joined him there in May 1940. Roman’s paternal grandparents, Mendel and Rachel, remained in Kharkiv. In June 1941, they would come to Brest for what was supposed to be a visit of just two or three weeks…
Roman was thrilled about the move. At the time, border guards were the heroes of countless books, plays, and films. He was certain that adventures awaited him in Brest and that he would surely catch a dangerous infiltrator. The Levin family’s home stood less than a kilometer from the border, and Brest Fortress could be seen in full view from their windows. On the day they arrived, while his parents and sister rested, Roman set out to explore the city on his own. He carefully studied the people passing by. There was a mysterious man in a cap–could he be a spy? And what about that woman over there?..
In June 1941, anxious rumors began spreading through the city. Roman’s mother would return from the market saying that salt and matches were disappearing from the shelves, and that the locals were whispering, “If not today, then tomorrow.” But his father, a career counterintelligence officer, kept repeating only one thing: “We must trust Comrade Stalin. He said there will be no war.”
A Party meeting was even held at the corps headquarters: officers who had tried to send their families away on leave were formally reprimanded and strictly forbidden to leave Brest.
The school year had already ended, but the drama club at the local House of Pioneers was still rehearsing under the direction of the city’s leading theater actor. Roman dreamed of becoming an actor and never missed a single rehearsal. On Saturday, June 21, he returned home close to midnight. His angry mother opened the door.
“How dare you?! Coming home at midnight–who gave you permission?”
“Mom, please don’t be angry. We had our final rehearsal. Tomorrow the city arts festival opens at the theater, and we’re performing Kataev’s The Lone White Sail, in which I have a role.”
He had brought home two invitation tickets–one for his father and one for his mother. But she would not listen.
“Go to bed this instant!”
As he drifted off to sleep, Roman thought about the next day. It promised to be a very special one…
He awoke to a deafening roar. His mother and father, only half dressed, were rushing frantically around the room, running out onto the balcony. To the west, the entire border was already ablaze. His sister shouted, “Quick! Get dressed!”
His grandparents were hurriedly packing a suitcase. His father checked and reloaded his pistol, slipped it into his pocket, and rushed toward the door. Roman darted after him, but his father turned sharply.
“Go back. You’re staying with your mother. Sima, go to where all the NKVD and counterintelligence officers’ families live. If we have to evacuate and there are trucks, they won’t be able to take everyone.”
The Levins ran out into the street. Paved with cobblestones, it rang with the sound of shrapnel striking the stones and sending up showers of sparks. Crowds of people were rushing toward the railway station–though, as it turned out, not a single train would leave Brest.
On the way, they came across soldiers wearing only their underwear and service caps. Roman’s mother asked one of them, “Where are you running? You’re needed over there!” The soldier waved his hand and replied wearily, “They don’t need us there anymore.”
Those words cut Roman to the heart. Later he learned that inside the fortress, men fought and died where they stood, many without even having time to get dressed. But these men–these men were running.
The family reached the home of the Kagans, where the deputy head of the Brest NKVD and his family lived. The apartment was crowded with frightened women and children. Kagan’s wife was beside herself with panic. Roman’s mother, by contrast, remained remarkably calm. Sima Levin tried to reach headquarters by telephone to find out whether trucks would be sent. At last someone answered. They were told to take shelter in the basement.
They had only just begun to go downstairs when Captain Yermolenko burst into the courtyard shouting, “Quick, to the vehicles!”
Two cars were waiting outside the gate. The first took the family of Sergeyev, the head of the Brest NKVD. The second was packed, with difficulty, with the Kagan family and the Levins. The cars pulled away… Then came a deafening explosion.
The Germans had bypassed the fortress along the riverbank, entered the city, positioned an artillery gun on the highway, and were firing directly into the streets. A shell struck their car. The windows shattered. Roman’s grandfather cried out in agony. The driver, only lightly wounded, jumped out and collapsed in a front garden.
Everyone scrambled out of the car and ran back into the courtyard. Roman’s mother was the first to realize something was wrong.
“Oh no–Grandpa isn’t here!”
He had managed to get out of the car but had collapsed by the gate. A piece of shrapnel had struck him in the side. At that very moment, another car pulled up–and the same gun fired again. It was a direct hit. The vehicle was blown apart, and the driver was killed instantly.
At the height of the fighting, an ambulance rushed into the courtyard. Under a relentless barrage of bombs and artillery shells, the vehicle bearing a red cross raced through the city, picking up the wounded. Roman’s grandfather was placed on a stretcher and loaded into the ambulance. His grandmother and the wounded driver went with him.
That left just the three of them: Roman, his mother, and his sister Tamara.
At about seven o’clock in the morning, they finally decided to venture outside. They had barely begun climbing the stairs from the basement when they heard footsteps above them. A German soldier descended the staircase. He looked like an educated man, wore glasses, and carried a submachine gun. Surveying the dim basement, he pronounced three words with chilling precision–words that Roman would remember for the rest of his life:
“Communist! Commissar! Jude!”
It was the first time they had ever heard the word Jude–Jew. The German stood there for a moment, then turned abruptly and walked away without waiting for a reply. There were no men in the basement, and perhaps that was why he did not open fire.
They stepped outside. At the intersection, where the same artillery gun had been firing, stood a disabled Soviet tank. Whether it had been sent on a reconnaissance mission or was trying to reach the defenders of the fortress, its crew had failed to spot the German gun. The Germans swung the artillery piece around and knocked the tank out with direct fire. The tank crew blocked the hatch–they had no intention of surrendering. The Germans then tore down nearby fences, ripped up benches from the boulevard, and built an enormous bonfire around the tank. Roman saw it with his own eyes. Later, local residents recovered the remains of the crew and buried the tankers right there at the intersection.
The Levins spent the first night of the occupation in that basement, too afraid to venture outside. On June 23, Roman’s mother packed a small handbag, leaving behind the suitcase that had been riddled with shrapnel, and the three of them set off for home. But as they drew near, they saw German officers lounging on their balcony, sunbathing and chatting cheerfully. Their home was only a stone’s throw away–yet it might as well have been a thousand miles. Without a word, they turned around and wandered through the city, with nowhere to go.
Near one of the houses on Moskovskaya Street stood a small wooden fence enclosing a tiny shack. A woman appeared in the doorway. She was a clerk from the grocery store that had been next to the Levins’ former home.
“Where are you going, ma’am?”
“Where? We don’t know.”
“Come with us.”
The woman took them in, and for the first few days they hid in her home. Roman’s mother warned her: “Please, don’t tell anyone we’re here.”
By then, the Germans were already searching for the families of Communist Party members and military officers.
A few days later, the Levins found Roman’s grandmother, Rachel. They learned that Roman’s grandfather, Mendel, had died on the way to the hospital. He had lost too much blood. He was buried in a mass grave in the hospital courtyard.
Left alone, Rachel did not lose her composure. She kept her husband’s passport, and for another month or two it helped feed the family. Beginning in August, the Germans distributed bread to the city’s civilian population only upon presentation of identity documents.
Before long, the wives of Alexander’s former colleagues found the Levins. They brought belongings that could be bartered and shared what little food they had. A family acquaintance who had returned from German captivity–the former head of the motor pool–told them that Alexander Levin had escaped Brest alive. Sima, however, did not believe him, fearing it was a provocation.
That fear would ultimately shape the family’s fate. When the Germans began organizing the ghetto, Sima Levin did not dare register herself and her children as Russians, as the wife of Kagan, the deputy head of the NKVD, had done.
As early as the beginning of July 1941, the Germans carried out their first mass murder of Jews, as well as Soviet officials and Communist Party members. Patrols–made up of field gendarmes and auxiliary policemen–went from house to house. People were taken to the stadium and shot. Among those murdered was the actor who had directed the drama club in which Roman had performed.
One scene remained with Roman for the rest of his life. For their own amusement, the Germans doused a poor Jewish man with gasoline and set him on fire. He burned like a living torch before everyone’s eyes. It was the first of many horrors Roman would witness.
By chance, a German supply convoy had been quartered next to the house where the Levins were hiding, and the auxiliary police never entered the area. That is how they survived the first roundup.
The Brest market remained closed for about three weeks. When it finally reopened, peasants from the surrounding villages began coming into the city, bringing food to barter for clothing and household goods. During those first weeks, the Levins went hungry because they had nothing to trade. Had it not been for the support of family friends–the Smirnovs, the Chinenovs, and the Pikus family–they would almost certainly have starved. Everyone shared whatever little they could. The officers’ families gathered for communal meals, where the only item on the menu was potato peel cutlets.
In August, Roman and his mother left the city in the hope of finding food. For an entire month, they wandered from one village to another. The villagers welcomed them warmly. Sima Levin was an excellent seamstress, and many families had accumulated fabric they had received in exchange for food, giving her plenty of sewing work. Roman, meanwhile, entertained people in their homes with improvised performances. He recited poetry and sang Soviet songs such as Wide Is My Motherland and Moscow in May. The peasants of Polesia, who had not yet experienced collectivization, listened with genuine interest. No one suspected that Roman and his mother were Jewish. Sima spoke flawless Ukrainian–she had grown up in Ukraine and had known the language since childhood. One day, however, the owner of the house where they were staying quietly took Sima aside.
“Serafima Moiseyevna, the village elder has been asking about you. Are you Jews?”
It was the first time anyone had spoken openly about their Jewish identity during their wandering. Sima grew alarmed. There could be no ghetto in every village, but the Germans had already begun sending orders to village elders to gather Jews for transfer to the cities. They had no choice but to return to Brest.
In the autumn of 1941, Brest’s Jews were forced behind barbed wire. A Judenrat, a Jewish police force, a bakery, and a hospital were quickly established inside the ghetto. Guards stood watch at the gates. Life came to revolve around a single goal: finding enough food to survive. Roman’s mother and sister were sent into the city for forced labor, while eleven-year-old Roman became a shoeshine boy. Together with his friend Boris Pikus, he built a small wooden shoeshine box and managed to obtain brushes and boot polish.
On the outskirts of Brest, near the Mukhavets River, it was much easier to slip out of the ghetto. Roman made his way to the city center–to the railway station, military hospitals, and soldiers’ clubs.
“Bitte, Herr, Stiefel putzen,” he would say, offering to polish the soldiers’ boots.
The risk was enormous, but police patrols were relatively infrequent, and Roman managed to leave the ghetto every day. Boris Pikus, who was connected to the underground resistance, gave him a special assignment: to count the trains carrying wounded German soldiers. Roman carried it out faithfully.
One day, Roman was nearly betrayed by a Polish boy who competed with him for customers. Seeing Roman polishing the boots of two German soldiers, the boy ran over and shouted, “Soviet! Jude!” Roman froze. But one of the Germans beckoned him over, handed him a piece of bread with marmalade, then grabbed the informer by the nose and chased him away.
On another occasion, in the spring of 1942, a smartly dressed German officer thrust a small suitcase into Roman’s hands and ordered him to carry it. At the railway platform, the officer paid him a whole Reichsmark–a considerable sum. But on his way back, Roman was seized by a policeman and taken to the station.
The officer in charge sat behind a desk with a homemade rubber truncheon lying in front of him. He questioned Roman: Who was he? Where was he from? Was he a Jew? Roman did not lose his nerve. He stubbornly stuck to his story: he was an easterner–the term used in the western regions of the Byelorussian SSR for people who had come from the eastern part of the republic. He lived in a village near Brest, and his mother was working there.
Then the policeman suddenly ordered him to pull down his trousers. Trembling, Roman obeyed.
“Oh, you’re telling the truth,” the officer concluded, and let him go.
At the time, Roman knew nothing about the Jewish practice of circumcision, so his release seemed to him nothing short of a miracle. The precious Reichsmark, however, was never returned.
The winter of 1941–1942 was brutally cold. Roman acquired a small sled, which he used whenever he slipped out of the ghetto. Somehow, he managed to bring back firewood, a dozen potatoes, or a little flour. Whatever people gave him, he never ate himself. He saved everything for his mother, his grandmother, and Tamara.
During this time, Roman’s mother fell into a deep depression. One day, he overheard her asking their friend Chinenova, who had worked in a pharmacy before the war, to obtain poison–for herself and her children. There was a small shed in the courtyard of the house where they were living, and Roman was constantly afraid that his mother would hang herself there. Whenever she was gone for too long, he would run to the shed to make sure she was not inside. In March 1942, a family friend named Klara made a suggestion.
“Let Tamara come with me. There’s a chance to go to the village of Telmy, near Brest. The German Organization Todt is quarrying gravel there and needs cooks. Tamara will have enough to eat, and you’ll have one less mouth to feed.” Roman’s mother agreed.
Then, in April, a new hope appeared. The Judenrat was recruiting workers for an estate in Petrovichi, near Brest. Sima discussed it with Roman’s grandmother Rachel, who encouraged her.
“Of course you should go with Roman. We’ve survived such a winter here.”
In Petrovichi, they found a long brick barracks, a kitchen with a huge stove and two cauldrons built into it, and the former manor house with its towers. The estate manager, known as “Pan Kapelyushnik,” assigned everyone their work. Sima was taken on as a cook. Every day she got up at three o’clock in the morning to peel potatoes. Sometimes she was called to the manor kitchen to prepare meals for guests. When the manager’s wife learned that Sima was an excellent seamstress, she began asking her advice about dress designs.
Roman and his friend Venya Kurgansky were assigned to herd pigs. After the bleakness of the ghetto, Petrovichi seemed almost like paradise to the boys. They drove the herd into an oak grove, rode the boars for fun, gathered mushrooms beneath century-old linden trees, and secretly stole eggs from hens’ nests. Roman even gave an impromptu performance for the local residents one day, reciting poetry and singing Wide Is My Motherland.
During the summer, Roman and his mother twice walked the eighteen kilometers to visit Tamara. She was working as a cook in an Organization Todt camp, well fed and in good health. Almost every week, Sima made the journey to the ghetto to see Rachel, bringing her food.
Then, in September, Sima caught a severe cold and was confined to bed with a fever of nearly forty degrees Celsius. Roman managed to obtain medicine from the manager’s house. His mother gradually recovered, but before long Roman himself fell ill.
In October 1942, when Sima had recovered enough to travel, she once again set out by horse-drawn cart for Brest to visit Rachel. She returned much sooner than expected, visibly shaken.
“It’s over. The ghetto is gone.”
They had been stopped on the road before reaching the city. People fleeing in the opposite direction shouted at them: “Where are you going? They’re liquidating the ghetto! They’ll kill you along with everyone else! Turn back!”
Historians would later establish that, according to various estimates, between seventeen and twenty thousand Jews perished in the Brest ghetto. The estate manager gathered the workers and lied to them, looking them straight in the eye.
“Keep working. No one is going to touch you. I’ll need workers next spring. Stay here and don’t run away.”
Sima did not dare flee, although Roman kept urging her: “Mom, let’s leave. There are forests all around us.” She only shook her head. “Where would we go? Winter is almost here.”
Restless and energetic as ever, Roman also tried to persuade Venya Kurgansky, his companion in tending the livestock, to run away. But the quiet, reserved Venya wanted nothing to do with the idea.
“Where could we possibly go? They’ll catch us on the road, beat us, and kill us. Here the manager says they won’t kill us. The same thing will happen to me as to my mother.” Frustrated, Roman replied with a confidence unusual for a boy his age: “They won’t kill me. I’ll escape.”
…In the early hours of October 26, 1942, it was still dark. As usual, the women were about to get up at three in the morning to prepare breakfast. Sima had only recently recovered from her illness, while Roman was still in bed with a high fever. They had barely lit the candles when auxiliary policemen burst into the room.
“Stay in bed! Stay in bed! Don’t get up! There’ll be no breakfast!”
It was immediately clear that something terrible was about to happen. Anxiously, people began getting dressed and whispering among themselves. The policemen locked the outside door, but the kitchen was still accessible. They decided to climb out through a window and gather in the main barracks, whatever might happen.
Ill with fever, barefoot, wearing only a heavy wool coat and not even managing to grab his cap, Roman squeezed through the window with the others. No one was asleep in the main barracks. People sat silently on the bunks, whispering to one another. Thirty or forty minutes passed.
Then the beams of truck headlights crashed through the windows. The door flew open. A German soldier stood in the doorway with a flashlight. He swept its beam across their faces and ordered: “Raus, Jude!”, which means “Out, Jews!”
No one wanted to be the first to step outside. Everyone backed away toward the wall, pressing themselves into the narrow spaces between the bunks. Then something seemed to strike Roman like a blow to the head. He remembered what he had once said about escaping. It was as if someone else’s voice–not his own–was commanding him: “Hide! You said they wouldn’t kill you!” Roman slipped beneath the bunks, crawling into the farthest corner behind suitcases and bundles. Even his mother, it seemed, did not notice where he had gone.
Then he heard her voice. The others were already moving toward the door, and realizing that her son must still be somewhere nearby, she said loudly, as though speaking into empty space: “If you manage to escape, my son, go to Tamara. Don’t forget your mother.” Those were the last words he ever heard her speak.
For a few minutes, everything fell silent. Then came gunshots, screams, and the barking of dogs. Soon one of the auxiliary policemen walked twice along the walls with a flashlight, bending down to look–but never crawling beneath the bunks. Roman could see only the tops of the man’s boots. The beam passed close by. Then they began boarding up the windows. Bang! Bang! Bang! Roman realized he could end up trapped like a mouse in a cage. He had to get out immediately.
He crawled out from his hiding place. By then he already had a plan. He could not flee through the estate–everyone there knew him. The only way was down the riverbank to the place where they had grazed the livestock. He would circle around the estate through the woods, reach the highway, and make his way to Tamara. It was the only route he knew.
He threw open the window and jumped. A policeman was standing at the left corner of the barracks. Either he failed to notice Roman, or he happened to look away at that very moment. Roman dashed across the yard toward the river, barefoot on the frozen ground. In those moments, he felt neither the cold nor his illness. He had only one thought: Run. Run as fast as you can.
He veered to the left and, skirting the site of the execution–where gunshots and screams could still be heard–made his way to the highway. The cold dew burned his bare feet, and the wet bushes lashed against his face. Behind him, the noise gradually faded away.
Ahead, a bridge came into view. Roman knew there was a patrol stationed there. Something inside told him to walk calmly and confidently–not too fast, but without slowing down. The sleepy auxiliary policemen in the guard hut gave the lone barefoot boy a lazy glance. No shoes, no bundle–just another local ragamuffin. What was there to suspect? Beyond the bridge was a crossroads with a sign pointing to Telmy. Roman left the highway, passed through the large village, and finally reached the barracks where his sister was living.
Tamara opened the door. She saw her brother–barefoot, filthy, wearing a torn coat, his eyes wild with shock. She understood everything without a word, yet her lips still formed the question: “Where’s Mom?” Roman answered in a voice unlike any she had ever heard from him: “We don’t have a mother anymore.” They embraced and burst into tears.
When they had cried themselves out, Roman begged his sister to flee with him. But Tamara looked at him with eyes that suddenly seemed far older than her years and said, “No. You have to go alone. You’re still a child–you don’t need papers. I’m already eighteen. Because of me, you’ll be killed.” She took her brother to a young priest she knew, Vasily Volynsky. He and his wife hid the boy for the night.
At daybreak, Tamara came running back. “Roman, you have to leave immediately! Prisoners escaped during the night. The punitive squads will be here any minute!” She gave him a pair of boots several sizes too big, stuffed with hay, a cap with a cracked visor, and a piece of bread. Roman left. A few hours later, Tamara and Klara, together with Klara’s child, were taken to the German bunkers and shot in a nearby grove. Roman would not learn what had happened until twenty-five years later.