East of Time Page 13

  The following morning a strange quiet hung about Herman’s room, almost a frozen hollowness. I feared the worst, and I was right. As I came closer, I noticed a slip of paper with my name on it. ‘Friend,’ the note read, ‘if you survive, please tell my story.’ And below that simple message, a few more lines scrawled in a shaky German hand:

  I lived in many worlds

  Few of them my own,

  Everywhere in exile

  Everywhere alone.

  Lipek’s Irony

  Lipman Biderman, whom his friends called Lipek, was a remarkable young man. I had known him from childhood. We had gone to the same kindergarten, often shared a desk at school, belonged to the same youth movement, read the same books. There were no secrets between us, and much of our free time we spent in each other’s company.

  Lipek was a well-built youngster with straight shoulders, a pitch-black mane that topped an elongated face, and a few freckles around his shapely nose. Two dark rings under his lower lids emphasized the slightly melancholic look in his stark black eyes.

  There was a rare harmony between Lipek’s mind and tongue, and he had an extraordinary way of expressing himself. His favourite mode was irony. Irony, he would explain, has many faces; you have to pick the one that fits you best, otherwise you’ll appear a caricature. Lipek was regarded as a paragon of discourse among his peers, and I can’t recall him ever pressing an argument that didn’t make sense.

  Once, in a political discussion just before the beginning of the war, I had heard him remark: ‘Time is both eternal and ephemeral; one has to be an inventor to use it prudently.’ And he continued: ‘Time has its own furtive agenda — more than once in our history it has surprised not only its denizens but its very self.’ One of the group couldn’t resist wondering out loud: ‘And what locality, sir, has the honour of claiming you as a denizen?’ ‘Paradise,’ the answer rang out (Lipek was just sixteen); ‘I dare say there is no substitute for the inevitable.’ He didn’t know how prophetic that answer was.

  As the vulgar vortex took full control of our lives, and our world of speculative illusion was replaced overnight by bitter reality, I revisited my friend, by now confined to his bed. We’d not seen each other for some time. He had a dry, hoarse cough and there were beads of sweat on his forehead. ‘At sunset my temperature rises,’ he said. ‘To keep me warm, of course.’ Noticing that I had spotted a copy of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain by his bedside, he observed: ‘You’ve no doubt read it — the Mountain of the Dying, where life’s glee is a waning ember and where all dreams end in fever. I hope one day to be there, to sit like Hans Castorp in the subtle shadows, inhaling the wisdom of the Renaissance man Settembrini, and then to lie with a smile between the breasts of the beautiful Clavdia. Do you know how often I’ve imagined Clavdia’s budding virtues...?’

  But it was not to be. One winter evening, as my friend’s temperature rose, two uniformed men entered Lipek’s apartment. His mother pleaded with them to let her son remain at home. They dragged him out of bed and handed him over to the thugs to whom they swore allegiance. At the break of dawn, while the gods were still snoring under their sky-blue eiderdowns, Lipek, renowned paragon of our youth, was marched off to a desolate place and shot.

  Promise

  Nisek Golusz, known for his infectious laugh and effervescent personality, had been the most promising student in our school, a favourite with teachers as well as classmates. An exceptionally well-read teenager, by fourteen he was already at home with the French and Russian classics, and according to all predictions was a future professor of literature.

  At school we were never very close: maybe because we belonged to two different economic strata, or perhaps because he lived in what was essentially a non-Jewish district — but more than anything because his intellectual horizons were so much wider than mine.

  Even as children, the gulf in our awareness of the world had been immense. I still recall the freezing winter’s morning in January 1933, when ten-year-old Nisek arrived at school with tidings whose seriousness none of us youngsters understood. ‘Germany,’ he had announced, his voice grave with foreboding, ‘has elected a new Chancellor.’

  Yet as the little Austrian usurped ubiquity, as his creepers entangled our walls in the high season of the absurd, while cut-throats in unlit corners lay in wait and searchlights kept morality at bay, our friendship blossomed and we began to spend time together. Once, as we walked arm in arm with our heads bare on the holy Sabbath, a passing religious Jew called out, ‘Scum!’ Nisek turned to the man and fired back, ‘To insult your fellows is to insult God.’

  By then I had become a part of his circle. We were a group of seven: six boys and a girl. A weaponless unit in the unarmed underground, we called ourselves the Flying Brigade and we dreamt of an uprising. We would meet every second week to discuss the political situation and the state of the war. Nisek, who carried on a perpetual love-affair with life, knew the atlas by heart and always had something positive and encouraging to say about the action on the various fronts. He would not be defeated by Rommel’s successes in North Africa, and enthusiastically invoked the spirit of the great Russian commander Kutuzov.

  Nine years after he had brought his ominous news to school, the Führer’s thugs informed Nisek and his family that they had been selected for resettlement (at that time none of us knew the sinister meaning of that term). We all turned up to say goodbye, never doubting our dear friend’s return. A few weeks later his coat came back — in its breast pocket a bullet-pierced, blood-smirched memento: Nisek’s old school certificate, neatly folded and full of promise.

  My Uncle’s Jacket

  Father’s older brother Avraham was a happy soul, and an extremely lucky entrepreneur. In 1903 he had successfully established a textile factory — in his dining-room! — and he never looked back. He had two huge wooden hand-weaving machines, and worked on one of them for sixteen hours a day. On the other machine was a young newly-wedded man from just outside town, whose way of life kept the sun locked out of his face. Since work began at daybreak and finished late at night, he could see his new wife only on the Sabbath.

  Unlike my father, Uncle Avraham wore the traditional Jewish garb, prayed to God every morning, kept the commandments, and wouldn’t hear of politics. His aim in life was a good meal and a sound business. And yes, he did well, very well. In fact the constant visits to the butcher by his wife, my buxom aunt Chaya, an expert in the culinary arts, used to create an envious wagging of tongues in our neighbourhood.

  Avraham was a granary of stories, and his specialty was the fable. I remember him telling me on one visit: ‘When God created our world, He also created a speck of air and a speck of dust.’ ‘Uncle,’ I interrupted, ‘what is a speck of air?’ He smiled at this. ‘Please, young man, a fable does not need a parable. Anyway, the speck of air,’ he resumed, ‘floated around joyously, and still floats around today, without complaint. But the speck of dust always collides with somebody’s eye. And who do you think suffers the most, the dust or the eye?’ I shrugged. ‘Both suffer!’ announced my uncle triumphantly. ‘The eye, because of the speck; and the dust, because it loses its freedom!’

  But soon enough, war and the ghetto destroyed Avraham’s happiness. The four sons and two daughters he had fathered in the alcove where he slept with his wife went off or were sent away, and never came back. In the end the only consolation from his once-flourishing textile enterprise was his two wooden weaving machines: they became an almost inexhaustible source of fuel for his stove.

  Early in 1942, Avraham and Chaya received their ‘wedding cards’, our ghetto euphemism for resettlement notices. When they brought us the news, and heard that we were also to be moved, uncle could not contain his joy. ‘You’ll see, Gershon,’ he declared with his ever-untamed exuberance, ‘we’ll go together. And no matter where to, no matter how small a room we’ll get, I’ll build another factory. We’re brothers after all, and together we’ll live through this difficult time in our li
ves.’

  I can still picture my uncle’s disappointment, the look on his grey face, the way he crawled into himself, when father told him a few days later that we had been excluded from this resettlement and were staying. The Bundist party, of which dad was among the oldest members in the ghetto, had devised a way to remove our names from the list. Families had to be resettled as complete units, and we had two infants, my two sisters’ little girls; it was a cruel winter and they would not have been able to make the journey. The job of ‘excluding’ us was given to a young Bundist, Melech Wajsman. In the middle of the night, at the peril of his own life, he climbed through a window into the resettlement office, and by the light of a pocket torch removed the page on which our names appeared.

  At the end of February it snowed, and the temperature dropped to perhaps 15 below zero. One morning at eight o’clock we went to say goodbye to our relatives. When we arrived we found uncle and aunt already sitting on a horsedrawn wagon with other people. On seeing my father, Avraham jumped down. ‘Gershon!’ he shouted with unquenched enthusiasm. ‘As soon as we get there, I’ll write and let you know how things are, and you can waste no time joining us.’ Waving her hand, Aunt Chaya cried ‘Be well!’ and the wagon drove off towards the assembly point.

  A month and a half went by without a word, without a hint as to the whereabouts of our relatives or the other deportees. Then, in April, a high-ranking officer sent by the commandant at the Chelmno camp, in the town the Germans called Kulmhof, some 70 kilometres west of the city of the waterless river, paid a surprise visit. He informed the Jewish ghetto administration — which quickly disseminated the happy news — that our deportees were living contentedly there, and letters would soon be forthcoming.

  About six months later my mother, by now employed in the official ‘state laundry’, found Uncle Avraham’s jacket among clothes that had arrived from various resettlements to be cleaned. It was riddled with bullets, and in one of the pockets was a scrap of paper with a single word scribbled in blood: ‘Chelmno’.

  Inner Freedom

  My father, secular agnostic though he was, had his heart firmly planted in tradition. Passover, he would say, is the annual celebration when we rekindle our collective memory of the Exodus, mankind’s first rebellion in the name of spiritual freedom.

  April 1942 was a spring without a blade of grass, a spring of skies without birds, while the very mice searched for food across the futile land. In our iron stove, a drawer from our wardrobe hummed its swan-song; yet come evening, a white cloth and two lit candles made a bold appearance on a table graced with emptiness. Father, in accordance with custom, had invited a friend to our Seder. A decent and noble man, Avraham Hirszfeld walked before God and had once belonged to that divine elite of whom it is written that not a word of theirs would the Lord let fall to the ground. But since January 1941, when his dying wife and two-year-old son had been sent to ‘work’ outside the ghetto, never to return, the quiet man who used to spend his life in prayer had turned into a disillusioned cynic.

  Our guest seemed visibly indifferent to the occasion as we sat down to the Seder; perhaps he had come merely to escape his loneliness. But as father recited the familiar preamble — ‘This is the bread of affliction which our ancestors ate in the land of Egypt. Let all who are hungry come and eat.’ — and lifted an imaginary matzah with his empty hand, Avraham unexpectedly erupted.

  ‘Oh, please!’ he cried out. ‘Our Almighty well knows that no normal ghetto household possesses a crumb of food tonight, let alone bread. Why should we continue to delude ourselves?’

  My wise father was quick to reply. ‘Because here, illusions sustain us,’ he said. ‘What is true or false has only a theoretical significance — that is, no significance at all — and to be beholden merely to reality in a ghetto like ours is to commit...’ He wouldn’t say what. ‘But let us continue, dear friend, with the beautiful myths embedded in our Passover story.’ He resumed his reading, and we moved on to the Ma Nishtana, the great ritual question (‘Why is this night different from all other nights?’) with its four answers — the second of which concerned the eating of bitter herbs.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ our friend interrupted again, ‘bitter is the key word! I wonder how the future will understand our life, our sorrows, our mournful festivities — and more than anything, men like me who were willing to be lied to.’

  ‘Please,’ said father sternly. ‘Let’s continue.’ And after the last answer had been given, he remarked: ‘Leave the future to posterity, Reb Avraham. I can assure you that a hundred years from now Jews will sit around the Pesach table, eating a fine meal, and perhaps they will even place on the Seder plate one further ingredient, a potato-peel, in memory of our present calamity!’

  We looked at Avraham, who seemed unconvinced. Father pressed on. ‘We were slaves to Pharaoh in Egypt—’

  ‘So what has changed?’ our guest retorted almost at once. Then, as if realizing at last that he was making a nuisance of himself, he raised his palm. ‘Sorry, go on. I won’t interrupt again.’

  And so my father, the secular agnostic, continued his reading unabated, contributing occasional comments in relation to our present circumstances. And when he arrived at the end, he again inserted his own message. ‘Next year, may the radiant light of our Passover guide humanity in its conquest of darkness.’

  Mother rose from the table and a few moments later served us our Passover meal: a watery soup, garnished with a solitary potato-peel, which however kept cunningly evading my spoon.

  Father smiled, looking at each of us in turn. ‘The Jews will sing again,’ he assured us, ‘and they will read from our ancient Haggadah — though possibly with a slight addition to the text: ‘And the Eternal brought us forth from Egypt, and indeed from the ghettos and the camps, not by means of an angel, not by means of a seraph, not by means of a messenger, but by Himself, the most holy, blessed be He in His glory.’

  Later, as he shook father’s hand to leave, I heard the embittered Avraham remark: ‘You seem visibly weary. Was it the reading or the sumptuous dinner?’

  ‘Probably both,’ father answered. ‘Especially the latter.’

  ‘So why do we do it?’ Avraham just couldn’t let go.

  ‘To keep alive our inner sense of freedom,’ said my father, gently closing the door.

  Linguistics

  Some sixteenth-century kabbalists believed that every word spoken by a righteous person created an angel. Evil words, on the other hand, begat devils. To confirm the truth of this postulation, they argued, one needed only to examine the language of the wicked.

  Our German custodians in the ghetto — essentially an unsophisticated, unlearned lot — would not have been able to devise, on their own, a vocabulary that suited yet circumvented the finalities of purpose it had to denote. Luckily for them, there was no shortage of scholars in Berlin whose flow of words was prolific. These astute academicians zealously volunteered their services, and in no time at all they had begotten by daylight a night-tongue of deceit.

  Resettlement became a virtual euphemism for murder. Special handling signified torture. To come high did not mean to be promoted, but to be hanged. To be called up was not to read from the Torah, but to be deprived of every last thing you had. Best of all, and definitely the most eloquent, was Work will set you free — free, that is, from life. Surely a stroke of sheer genius!

  But it would be an extreme miscarriage of justice against Nazi ingenuity if one were not to include their seminal guiding principle — Order. Chaos had to be avoided at all costs, and the terminology must follow suit. This doctrine was perfectly exemplified by the ultimate directive: Distribute a towel and a piece of soap to each figure before the final entrance to the showers.

  Once the doors were sealed, an official of the master race, notebook and pencil in hand, would ascend to the roof of this intricate invention, where the aspiring professor of linguistics could pin his blue eyes to the observation window, so as to record for posterity his academy
’s crowning achievement — the agony of dying children...

  Guilt was not frequent among these peculiar devil-creators. They looked upon what they produced as a normal endeavour, an accepted industry within the system of their dream. The dream had spawned its own language, and the language nourished the dream.

  Suicide

  Like a wet smear, a rumour ran through the ghetto. A fearful and tangible murmur.

  The Hunt.

  The Germans, employing the Jewish police as their sniffer dogs, were about to strike at the very essence of our being. Nobody knew when; we knew only that all ghetto children under the age of ten and all adults over sixty-five would be taken, to be ‘resettled’. We were accustomed to confronting death on a daily basis, but this latest perfidy caused the ghetto, that surreal asylum, to go berserk. Between 5 August and 5 September 1942, a plague of suicides — a spit in the face of creation — swept through our community.

  Among these suicides was 27-year-old Kuna Leska, known after she married as Kuna Rotsztajn, who lived with her infant daughter Rifkele and her brother Gedaliah in a one-room apartment on the fifth floor of a nearby block. Like many others, Kuna had become acutely aware that her life was dangling from a cobweb’s thread over a dark, bottomless abyss. She was alone: in 1940 the Germans had conscripted her husband Michael to forced labour; a year later she was notified that he had ‘died’ in the course of his ‘work’. Kuna was devastated; no doubt the blow nourished her psyche with murky solutions. And so, on that defeated sunny afternoon of 19 August, she jumped from her window into the liberating arms of death. Why she left her child behind is a question to which no one should seek an answer. Nothing will become clearer through explanation, and for the sake of a survivor’s sanity it is dangerous even to ask.