As the Holocaust ended, Shunkale Hochman’s family emerged after more than a year in hiding underground. She still carries the guilt of a survivor.
BY JOE HABERSTROH
STAFF WRITER
June 23, 2004
Whenever 70-year-old Shunkale Hochman feels overwhelmed, for
one reason or another, she enters a room in her elegant home in western Nassau County,
closes the door, turns out the lights and sits in the darkness. It is a trick
of the mind.
"The darkness is safety to me," she said, "because I was safe in
the darkness."
In the annals of the Holocaust, it is almost difficult to be amazed by new tales
of Jewish survival. Even though millions died, many managed to survive through
individual heroism, sheer endurance or even luck. But Shunkale Hochman's story
is unique.
Hochman, along with 37 other people, lived in underground caves for more than a
year and survived the liquidation that befell virtually all the Jews of her
hometown in Ukraine. She was 9 years old.
Underground, her own extended Stermer family and others dwelled in complete
darkness, limiting their use of kerosene lamps to just an hour or two a day. To
survive, the families ate little and slept away the days. Her uncles and male
cousins emerged at night to buy supplies from sympathetic villagers or to filch
potatoes from unsuspecting farmers. But the children remained below, month after
month. In the 1960s, local cavers first discovered evidence of this temporary
wartime community in what the Ukrainians called Popowa Yama - "Priest's
Grotto" - a 77-mile- long cave system that sprawls under the region's
famously productive wheat fields.
But no one had tracked down the people who had hidden there.
An article this month in National Geographic Adventure, however, profiles the
detective work of Chris Nicola, a Queens- based cave explorer who has worked
for years to find the Jews who hid in the caves. But Hochman was not
interviewed for that article and is telling her story publicly for the first
time. Until now, she was among the Stermer elders who had shared their memories
quietly over the years only at family gatherings.
"As a child, I didn't really comprehend the magnitude of the stories my
mother and grandmother and uncles were telling," said Shunkale Hochman's
son, Mark Hochman, a dentist who lives in Lake Success. "Then, when Chris
Nicola showed us the slides of the actual cave, to me it was unbelievable. It
was as if they [family members] had understated what the story was really
about, what they had really gone through."
Crediting her heroes
Shunkale Hochman says it is her duty to speak now, but it is not easy for her.
She carries the guilt of the survivor, and a lucky one whose mother and sister
also lived. She takes pains to credit those she describes as heroes: the
Stermer matriarch, her grandmother Esther; her uncle Nissel, who led the
families to Priest's Grotto; and her other uncles, Shulim and Shlomo - they are
alive in Montreal - who scrounged supplies under the eyes of the Nazis. As for
Shunkale Hochman, she was a girl then, a girl with a bow in her hair.
The story begins in 1942 in the western Ukrainian community of Korolowka, in
what a few years earlier had been Poland. To imagine the place, Hochman
suggests, think of the rustic village depicted in "Fiddler on the
Roof."
In Korolowka lived 1,500 Jews, who were viewed with suspicion by many of the
Ukrainian villagers. Among these 1,500 were the extended Stermer family, a
prosperous clan of merchants headed by Esther Stermer.
One of Esther's adult daughters, Henia, was married to a merchant named Fishel
Dodyk. These were Shunkale Hochman's parents. She had one sibling, a sister
Pepkale, then 4 years old. Fishel Dodyk doted on his daughters and liked to
bring back treats for them from his business trips out of town. Shunkale always
wore patent leather shoes and she recalls being the first child in her town to
have a snowsuit. It was lime green.
In the fall of 1942, the Nazis had occupied Korolowka for one year. As the
Stermers' strong-willed leader, Esther Stermer sized up the situation and
coordinated the construction of hidden bunkers, usually dug out under floor
boards, at the family's homes. She even conducted drills to see how fast the
men, women and children could hide.
In October 1942, on the first day of the Jewish holiday Sukkot, gunfire
crackled in the air. Korolowka had been declared Judenfrei - free of Jews. Nazi
soldiers, together withthe local police, were rounding up some of the Jews for
transport to death camps. Others were shot and buried in mass graves.
Hochman, her grandmother, her mother and sister Pepkale fled to a bunker in the
barn. They lay there side by side "like herrings." Hochman heard the
German soldiers clunking around in the barn, searching. She watched as her
mother shushed her little sister quiet.
The soldiers left the barn, and later that day Hochman learned that all her
family on her father's side had either been shot or taken away. Soon a plan
developed to travel a few miles away to where tourists frequented a network of
caves known as the Giant Gypsums. Nicola says some of the caves contain
archaeological evidence dating to 3000 BC.
A history of hiding
"The children in this area all grew up with these stories of how the caves
had saved previous cultures from invading armies," he said. During the
Middle Ages, the area often was overrun by warlords from competing settlements
that dotted the rolling landscape. Later, Cossacks fought against Polish
authority in the same area, sending the more resourceful civilians underground
once again.
Traveling at night, the Stermers and the other families hiked to their first cave,
known as Verteba. Conditions were harsh. They captured water in cups as it
dripped from the walls. Ventilation was poor for their wood fires. And the cave
was well known to local people; there were maps in circulation to help tourists
find the cave.
The families were brought supplies by Hochman's father, Fishel Dodyk, and two
other of the men who had a permit from the Nazis to allow them to collect scrap
metal in the area. The Nazis would soon stop granting such privileges as they
systematically limited the movement of the local Jews, then began the final
deportations. But while it lasted, the scrap-metal route provided the Stermer
men the cover they needed to secretly deliver kerosene and grain to the
families underground. The men also scavenged wood scraps so beds and other
basic furniture could be fashioned. And they brought increasingly grim news, as
the Jews of Korolowka were taken away day after day.
Gestapo invaders
One day in March 1943, German voices rang out in the dark. The Gestapo was in the
cave. In the commotion, Hochman was ordered by a relative to hide under a bed.
She remembers shiny black boots. The soldiers' flashlights bounced around in
the blackness.
Her grandmother, an imperious woman, 5 feet, 8 inches tall, strode up to the
man in charge. She spoke to him in German.
"Ah, so you have found us!" said Esther Stermer, as family members
scuttled deeper into the cave system to an escape route that went 50 feet to
the surface. "And what do you think? Do you think the führer will lose the
war if a few Jews hide in a cave?"
"People don't live in caves," the Gestapo man said.
"All we want is to be left alone."
Hochman's grandmother and several others were lined up for the march out. But
the grandmother and another of the children escaped. They leapt behind
crevices, using their familiarity with the cave to navigate its maze of stony
passages in the dark.
As the Nazis chased the Stermers in the dark, Hochman's 22-year-old Uncle
Shulim, who had engineered the escape shaft, collapsed from nervous tension. He
was the one who knew how to open the surface hatch, and the others struggled to
get out. He sat slumped at the base of the shaft, frothing at the mouth.
Hochman recalls the terror, but also what one of her aunts said to her:
"Don't worry, Shunkale. Whatever happens to me will also happen to
you."
They finally wrenched open the lid on the escape shaft, and crawled out, one by
one. Shulim regained some of his senses, and Esther dragged him as he stumbled
out of the cave and into the darkness. The Gestapo was hunting them.
Flashlights pivoting. Dogs barking. Soldiers shouting. The families crept
across the fields before they received shelter in the barn of someone Hochman
recalls was a "righteous Christian."
But Hochman's grandmother, who was slowed as she helped Shulim to walk, was
apprehended by local police. She was released when she assured the officer that
money would be sent so that his child could have a bicycle.
Two of the clan - a mother and her son - were executed by the police. The rest
hid in the barn until May, when Hochman's Uncle Nissel Stermer - who eventually
emigrated to Canada, where he died a few years ago - led the survivors a few
miles away to their second cave, Priest's Grotto.
"I can see it still today," Hochman said. "You entered standing
up. You slid right down. It was like a chimney hole."
There they remained for 344 days. With the 150 days in the first cave, the
families spent 494 days underground. Without artificial lights, Chris Nicola
says, the cave is "blacker than black." The families used ropes to
guide their way at first, then came to memorize their way in the dark. The
children were afraid, but they were with their closest family members. They had
heard the gunshots in Kurolowka, and they had an understanding of the
alternative to the surreal conditions they endured.
Rules for survival
"The dark doesn't frighten me," Hochman said. "It was the people
upstairs who frightened me." Sounds from the surface generally could not
be heard - the cave was in a remote area - except by the younger boys who
gathered near the entrance shafts. Over time, the adults enforced a
regimentation that Hochman believes helped everyone survive. People rose each
day at about the same time, they cooked and ate together and they restricted
the use of their lamps to short periods.
"The stress of being underground for that long a time must have been
difficult," Nicola said. "But, because of family love and loyalty,
they got through it. These people were basically in solitary confinement."
To cut down on drafts, the men built stone walls and hung fabric from
rough-hewn frames. They chiseled steps and dug trenches to make it easier to
walk in the dark. They sipped from subterranean lakes, including one that
Nicola estimated was 50 feet by 30 feet and more than 20 feet deep. It was
chilly in Priest's Grotto - always about 50 degrees. But they had blankets from
the village, and they slept close together.
Limits on light
The families ate a thin soup made from potatoes, and they baked a crude bread
from flour they ground themselves. One night, Uncle Nissel bought and carried a
150-pound millstone from a local farmer who lived three miles away. "We
slept 22 hours a day," Hochman said. "We all had little kerosene
lamps, and we could have them on for an hour or two. We would wash ourselves.
We would boil our clothes."
The families lit fires inside, and the constant breeze inside the huge cave
carried away the smoke. Today, cavers have found distant chambers in Priest's
Grotto where the walls are coated with soot from long-ago fires.
For more than a year, they lived in a sort of suspended animation, and
diversions were few. Asked if she managed to bring a doll as the family fled,
Hochman laughed lightly, as if in disbelief. "A doll. A doll. My sister
was my doll."
In place of books were stories shared from the pages of memory. Hochman's
mother told about Polish history and about Judaism. "I knew about Esther,
about Ruth, about King Solomon. We sang Polish songs. I recited poetry."
In the many quiet moments, Hochman prayed that their father - often away on
scrounging missions - would return safely. And always she dreamed of her
girlfriends. Later, she learned all of them had been killed.
One day the families realized the entrance to their cave had been sealed with
logs by local peasants. It took days to tunnel back out. The incident provided
dramatic evidence of the families' unpredictable relationships with their
former neighbors. Some of the good Ukrainians risked their lives to help the Stermers.
One day a bottle on a rope appeared in the entrance shaft. Inside, a note:
"The Russians are here." It was April 12, 1944. They decided to wait
10 days.
On April 22, they climbed out. Snow covered the rolling fields. Little Pepkale
asked her mother to turn out the light, but it was the sun she spoke of. They
saw a burned-out tank, and artillery shells pocked the icy landscape. Above
their silent grotto, the war had raged, and now the Nazis were gone.
Dirty, weak, shoeless
Still covered with mud from their exit up the cave shaft, the three dozen
survivors stumbled into Korolowka. They had no shoes - those had worn out in
the rough passages of the caves - and they were weak from too little food. They
found that their homes had been ransacked or greedily dismantled, brick by
brick. There were no more Jews in Korolowka. The pre-war population of 14,000
Jews in greater Korolowka had been reduced to 300, Nicola said.
But Shunkale Hochman, her sister and both parents had survived - they were an
actual, intact Jewish family. This thrilling achievement proved painfully
brief. In the wild wind- down of the war, and in circumstances Shunkale still
does not understand, her grandfather and father were executed a few months
later by Ukrainians.
"He was 35 years old," she said of her father. "Such a handsome
guy. Such a nice guy. ... My mother was 33. She was left a widow with two small
children. And I loved my father so much."
She ended up with her sister and mother in a displaced persons camp in Germany,
and in 1947, she came to Brooklyn by herself. She lived in foster homes for a
few years before her mother arrived with her sister.
In Brooklyn, Hochman says she worked hard to be "an all- American
girl." She wore saddle shoes, learned English, studied hard at Thomas
Jefferson High School and worked after school at a variety store. She met her
future husband, Harry Hochman, in 1949. He also was a survivor of the
Holocaust, a man Shunkale says was "hunted like deer" in Poland by
the Nazis. But the young couple spoke little then of their harrowing
experiences.
A time to move on
"We danced and we had fun," she said. "We didn't want to dwell
on the past. We did not want to be in the ditches with the dead people."
They married in 1952, the same week she graduated from high school. The couple
celebrated their 52nd anniversary on Monday. They have three children, Mark
Hochman; Linda Smook, of Roslyn; Florence Hochman, of West Palm Beach, Fla.
They also have three grandchildren.
Harry Hochman had a successful meat business, as the couple lived in Bayside
and then moved to Nassau County. Shunkale worked as a bookkeeper in Manhattan
but trained most of her energies on the Hochman home, where she planted and
tended flourishing ranks of hydrangea and hosta.
Today, Hochman's airy house is full of bright surfaces that reflect the light
streaming in from outdoors. Her kitchen table is white, and it is surrounded by
white chairs. Most of the walls downstairs are white, as are some of the
floors.
Even so, the cold labyrinth of her past is not far from her mind. For strength,
she said, she has always recalled the strong voice of her grandmother Esther,
shouting down the Gestapo man - "Ah, so you have found us!" She
remembers the image of Esther dragging her son Shulim across the dark fields.
Shunkale Hochman sometimes goes upstairs and closes the door and turns out the
light.
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