The Winds of War (The Henry Family, #1)

by Herman Wouk

Anyway, I was having a drink with them—if you get this tired you have to keep up an alcohol level in your bloodstream, it’s a sort of emergency gasoline—when a knock came on the door, and in walked a fellow in worn-out boots, a cap, a heavy shabby coat, and it was a Jewish merchant from Warsaw, Jochanan Jastrow, Natalie’s uncle! The one they call Berel. Briny and Natalie went to his son’s wedding in south Poland, you recall, and that’s how they got caught in the invasion. He’s clean-shaven, and speaks Russian and German with ease, and he doesn’t seem Jewish, though Slote remarked that in Warsaw he wore a beard and looked like a rabbi. This fellow’s escape from Warsaw with the remnants of his family is a saga. They landed in Minsk and got caught there when the Germans blitzed White Russia. He gave us only bare details of how he got himself and his family out of Minsk through the woods, but obviously this is quite a guy for maneuvering and surviving. Here comes the incredible part. Jastrow says that late one night, about a month after the capture of Minsk, the Germans came into the Jewish ghetto they had set up, with a caravan of trucks. They cleaned out two of the most heavily populated streets, jamming everybody into these trucks: men, women, children, babies, old folks who couldn’t walk. Several thousand people, at least. They drove them to a ravine in the forest a few miles out of town, and there they shot them, every single one, and buried them in a huge freshly dug dit...