He came in the middle of the night. We had been up anyhow. It didn’t take a great deal of thinking to know that what happened would lead to trouble and trouble here is a serious matter. I tensed as the heavy footsteps approached the door. I had bolted it securely and it was a great relief to hear a respectful knock and a familiar voice, “Max, Max, it’s Petr.” “Just a moment Petr.” I grabbed my housecoat and searched for my slippers. The room was freezing, the woodstove had been off for several hours. Bathsheva turned to me and whispered, “Should I make a fire, tea?” “No my dear,” as I pulled on my work pants and boots and said again, “Just a moment Petr.”
I hurried to unbolt the heavy door and turned to my wife to remain in bed. I slipped out the door, bolted it securely behind me and faced Petr on the path to the house. The moon was almost full, in the clear night sky, lighting the woods surrounding the house. The snow crunched under my step, the hair in my nose froze. I motioned to Petr to move away. I didn’t want Bathsheva to hear our conversation. I was calm. The Sheriff, Petr, although not Jewish, was a friend. I knew he was here to help in some way. Yet what was going on? Maybe he was here to tell me I had to pay something to make up for it. Maybe he was here to admonish me for what I had done, to tell me what a fool I had been. Was I supposed to go with him to apologize – not likely? However, this kind of advice did not require a middle of the night visit. I shuddered and imagined my pregnant wife in her bed huddled in fear and the two little ones. Petr looked at me carefully. I could see how serious this was.
“They are coming to kill you Max – a whole bunch of them, not only those two.” I didn’t want to believe what I was hearing. Kill me, kill me. There were two of them and I was one. I had needed to stand up as a man to their taunts, to drive them back, to resist the coming Pogrom. “Quickly, pack up some things. You can make it on foot to the next village and stay there with my friends until this is over. In a couple of days they’ll leave. They don’t come from around here. And I’ll make certain your wife and the children are safe. Do what I say Max. And hurry.”
The door of the house opened. Bathsheva, wrapped in a blanket and barefoot, beckoned to me from the threshold. “We will be safe. No one will harm us under Petr’s protection.” I could see how much Bathsheva was trying to be brave, how frightened she was. It broke my heart. What an idiot I am to have put this lovely woman, my wife and our children in danger.
Petr waited outside while I followed Bathsheva back into the house. She grabbed a cloth sewn into a pack and put some things in it while I rushed about getting dressed for the cold. I knew the safest thing to do was to follow Petr’s advice. Not much was necessary. After all, I would be gone a few days at most. Tempers are calmed by time and by exhausting the village alcohol. It would all be over soon. Bathsheva grabbed me for a final hug as I went through the door. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I’ll see you in just a few days.” I’ll take Ester and Emanuel to my mother’s house.”
As I followed Petr down the path away from the house I kept turning to look back at Bathsheva standing in the doorway. She waved and I waved back. Petr hurried me along. “Come on Max, we don’t have much time.” I followed his advice having no way of knowing that I would next see my family, including my unborn son, ten years later, six thousand miles away in the United States.
My father Yitshak Grunglaz, who became Irving Green, was the unborn child who finally met his father in the United States at a small hamlet in the Adirondack Mountains in 1921, when, after the turmoil of World War I and the Russian Revolution, my grandfather Mordechai (Max) was able to finally bring the family together, a family separated by his enraged attack on two Cossacks carrying secret orders from Igoman, the province’s capital “to strike the Jews for three days,” authorizing the initiation of a Pogrom (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiev_Pogrom_%281905%29).
