By SHERRY HALBROOK
All his life, PEF member Chris Nicola has been fascinated by puzzles and mysteries, but recently his dogged pursuit of the truth led him to an extraordinary international discovery that has made the news in this country and abroad: how a few Jewish families “buried” themselves in caves to survive the holocaust in eastern Europe.
A senior professional conduct investigator for the state Education Department (SED) in New York City, Nicola, 53, spends his workdays running to ground complaints and allegations about pharmacists, therapists, engineers and other professionals licensed by the SED. His findings can sustain or end the professional lives of the people he investigates.
However, it was not his state job that led Nicola to his amazing discovery. It was his daredevil spirit (He’s a scuba diver, bridge diver and former marathoner.) and his love of caving.
One search led to another
In 1993, Nicola went to an area of the Ukraine which was part of Poland until Hitler ceded it to Russia in 1939 (only to invade Russia in 1941 and occupy the area until 1944).
Nicola went there to search for information about his grandfather, Vladermir Selieff — “a Cossack” who died under mysterious circumstances after the Russian trade delegation to London that he was part of was deported for alleged espionage.
Nicola did not find news of his grandfather in the Ukraine, but he did begin to explore the Priests’ Grotto, a 77-mile-long labyrinth of passages, and the 10th largest cave in the world. Near Korolowka, it is part of a vast web of caves there known as the Gypsum Giants.
“When you cave,” Nicola said, “you know there is always a chance that you will turn a corner and see something no one else has ever seen. You might find a gem or, in this case, a gem of a story. When that happens, it’s a tremendous rush.”
As he explored Priests’ Grotto with local Ukrainian cavers, Nicola asked them if they knew how
signs of long-term human habitation — man-made walls, old shoes, and a millstone came to be in one part of the cave.
“There was a tremendous language problem,” Nicola said. “At first they told me the artifacts were probably left by Soviet resistance groups called the “Banderas” that hid out in the caves in 1945 to ’46, and which led the Soviets to blow up the entrances to the caves.”
SILENT TESTIMONY — Jews carved their names into the walls of the cave where they
hid.
Convinced there was more
“Every year, I’ve come back to explore the cave again and ask more questions,” he said. “That’s when I began to hear local legends about Jewish families who had hidden in the caves during World War II. Some people said they emerged covered in yellow mud in 1944 after the German’s retreated. Others said they died.
“I found a monument in the town square dedicated to the 14,000 Jews who perished there during the Nazi occupation (mostly in mass executions in 1942) and the Soviet Union’s scorched-earth tactic when its forces withdrew. Only about 300 Jewish inhabitants survived.”
Each year when he returned, Nicola asked more questions and finally was told that at least three families had survived a long living-interment in the cave, but still no one seemed to know what happened to the families after
they emerged.
Nicola mentioned the story on a Web site he created for the Ukrainian-American Youth Caver Exchange Foundation
(www.uaycef.org) and asked anyone with additional info to e-mail him.
“At home in Queens, I searched the Internet, new and used book stores and libraries for any mention of the Banderas, caves, grottos and Jews,” Nicola said. “But the language barrier continued to be a serious problem for me. Information could be in Hebrew, Yiddish, Polish, Russian, German or some other language. The same people and places were given different names in different languages.”
An answer, at last
Finally, in December 2002, Nicola opened his e-mail and found a message from a man who said his father-in-law, Sol Wexler, was one of the Jews who had survived in the Priests’ Grotto and that he was now living in the Bronx.”
The message was the break he had been waiting years to find, but Nicola said he was so stunned when he found it that he could barely summon up the courage to print it out.
“I was afraid I would accidentally erase it,” he said.
He did not erase it, and that one solid lead has put him in touch with six survivors of the cave, mostly members of an extended family named Stermer
living in downstate New York and in Montreal.
They told him a chilling but amazing story of how the family’s matriarch, Esther Stermer, told them in 1942 to defy Nazi orders to register and to find somewhere to hide, instead.
They had heard that ancient inhabitants of the area had survived enemy attacks by hiding in some of the region’s many caves. So, on a cold October night in 1942, the Stermers and two other families and several neighbors fled to a cave known as Verteba, only to be discovered by the Gestapo about six months later. While most of them escaped through a hidden tunnel they had made to the surface, five of them, including two children and their mothers were captured.
Through bribes and other more gruesome measures, three of them were allowed to flee the pit where they were thrown and machine-gunned, but two were killed.
For one bitterly cold spring month they all hid in a bunker behind a barn, and then were finally led by a Ukrainian forester to the entrance to Priests’ Grotto where he helped them to survive for another 344 days, until he could drop them a message to tell them it was time to come out.
While the men and older boys left the caves sometimes at night to search for food and fuel, the women and children remained underground the entire time, according to Nicola, and unwittingly set the world record for continuous life underground which NASA researchers thought they had set in 1972 when a Frenchman stayed underground in a Texas cave for 205 days and nights.
Nicola said two of the cave’s 38 survivors were killed shortly after they emerged, and the entire issue of the holocaust has remained a very sensitive one for people of that region.
The Stermers told Nicola that when they reached Canada, they found that other Jews who had survived the death camps did not believe their story of surviving in a subterranean hideout. So, they stopped talking about it and focused on building new lives.
Still discovering himself
All in all, Nicola’s love of puzzles and adventure led him to uncover far more than he could have ever imagined.
What he has found has changed him — and not just because of the brief blaze of fame that magazine and newspaper stories, and appearances on National Public Radio, the BBC (British Broadcasting Corp.) and national television have brought him.
Rather, he has learned about the enduring lessons that history can teach us and he has shifted his goals.
As someone who already holds degrees in physics, criminal justice and criminology, he was already working on a bachelor’s degree in forensic psychology and a doctorate in criminology.
Now, Nicola said, he has also begun to work toward a master’s degree in anthropology.
And he continues the long search for clues to the fate of his grandfather.
The
Communicator July/August 04
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