East of Time Page 16

  Young men of bronze

  impelled by a will

  to appease the anger

  of years that have flown —

  Come, let us go,

  let us leave the weaklings behind...

  But now Kuba was dying. Ghetto hunger had brought on tuberculosis. He knew it was the end, yet here he was, pleading: ‘Tell me a lie. Please tell me they are losing the war, it will make it so much easier to die.’

  ‘There’s no need to lie,’ I reassured him. A few of us were standing around his bed. ‘They are losing the war, and you’ll live to see it.’

  ‘Thanks, friend,’ he smiled. ‘I still have the talent to surrender to fantasies, to be utterly deceived by dreams. You know I was always a free-thinker, but now, with this body becoming a battleground of life and death, I’ve come to understand that there is nothing stronger within us, nothing mightier, than that mysterious force of which we know nothing...’

  For a good minute he kept his eyes closed. I felt a stab in my heart, fearing that they had closed for the last time. But suddenly they opened again, alive, larger and wider than ever, gleaming blue-gold, like the bright flames of two dwindling candles.

  ‘I read once,’ he said, in a voice that was almost unearthly, ‘a poem written by a Hungarian poet whose name I’ve forgotten. A mother is speaking to her son, who has been condemned to death. “I have been granted an audience with our young king,” she tells him. “I’ll bow my grey head before him, kiss his feet, and beg for your life, my only one. When you climb the steps up to the gallows, turn your eyes towards our balcony. I’ll be standing there, and if you see a black scarf around my neck, you will know, my son, that your mother failed you; but if the scarf is white, as I am sure it will be, you’ll know, my son, that mercy has been granted.”

  ‘And so, at dawn the next morning, the young man walks towards the gallows, the bleak sea of his life raging about him, rising and falling between to be and not to be. As he climbs the final step, where the treacherous noose hangs ready to cradle his head, he cautiously turns to the balcony where his mother stands, waving her hand. And there, about her neck — Oh God, the scarf of life!

  ‘He pauses for a moment, then radiantly steps up to the rope, where shortly he will swing with a smile on his youthful lips.’

  My Aunt’s Candlesticks

  My mother’s sister, Esther Hinda, was renowned for her piety, but she had a bitter life. Her husband, my uncle Shlomo, who kept a shoe shop at Nowomiejska 28, was a chain-smoker and an incorrigible scoffer at religion. According to the beadle at our local synagogue, Shlomo paid the price: in 1935 he contracted cancer and the following year he was off to face his Maker. His departure was excruciating, but my uncle was also stubborn and stoical, and refused to complain. His doctor, Herszkowicz, a man with murderous grey eyes, and hands that looked as though they were forever soaked in soapy water, begged him: ‘Please, Shlomo; moan, cry, scream — it’ll be easier.’ But the patient wouldn’t hear of it. ‘No, doctor. Dying is not an art, but to die like a man is.’

  After my uncle’s death Hinda and her five daughters inherited the shoe shop, but none of them had any idea about the business so things went from bad to worse. As luck would have it, soon after the Germans seized our city of the waterless river they assigned the shop to a prominent and meticulous compatriot, who quickly relieved the family of its services, then secretly placed my aunt’s name on a list of the city’s well-to-do.

  On Kościelna Street, amid leafy trees behind St Mary’s Church, there stood a two-storey redbrick house occupied by the criminal police, known as the ‘Kripo’. Jews who had the misfortune to be interrogated in that bastion of justice seldom came out in one piece. On a wintry Monday, just after reciting her morning prayers, Esther Hinda received an invitation to the aforesaid house to declare her wealth.

  ‘Apart from my engagement ring,’ the frightened woman stuttered, ‘my earrings, and five silver coins with the image of Józef Piłsudski, I have nothing to declare.’ Two hefty slaps on the face and a blow to her belly from Sutter, the man in charge, made Hinda spit out her dentures, which contained a number of teeth capped with gold. ‘Aha!’ said the master interrogator, who spoke Yiddish as capably as any Jew. ‘If you open your mouth voluntarily, you’ll get off lightly. Aren’t you aware that we know everything about you? Of course I’ll accept your jewellery without qualms, and your Piłsudski coins, but to hold back from us your famous candlesticks would be nothing short of sheer chutzpah.’ Sutter smiled meaningfully. ‘Now strip!’ he shouted, knocking off her wig.

  Standing naked in the freezing windowless room, her small hands covering her private parts, Hinda looked like a frightened, emaciated boy. One nod from Sutter and his gang of three bullies began rhythmically to punch her tiny body. But she would sooner have parted with her life than with the Sabbath candlesticks which her forefathers had saved from the fires of Lisbon, and her foremothers had carried, like babes enveloped in prayer-shawls, through Venice, Paris and Amsterdam, until they brought them to this land of her birth.

  Every Friday in the ghetto, after her children had escaped to Russia at the outbreak of war, Hinda would cautiously descend through the trapdoor under her bed into a dark musty basement. She would spread a white cloth over an empty wooden crate, pull the candlesticks from their hiding-place and light two candles, covering her eyes with her hands as tears rolled down her sunken cheeks. She would chant: ‘Blessed art thou, Lord out God, King of the universe, who hast sanctified us with Thy commandments, and commanded us to kindle the Sabbath lights.’

  How she must have longed for the peace and solitude of that basement as, over three long days, Hinda was kicked, bludgeoned and whipped by Sutter and his cronies; but she would not give in. On the fourth day, lying naked on the floor, bleeding from her ears, nose and mouth, as Sutter yet again brought his booted foot against her thin neck, she heard the voice of her father, Aba Bresler: Esther Hinda, daughter mine, for God’s sake remember Pikuach nefesh — life above everything.

  That was when my aunt finally relented.

  Sutter had the candlesticks promptly retrieved and brought to him. He studied the inscription engraved under the base of each of the ancient pieces: ‘Porto Israel, Lisboa 1457,’ he read out. ‘I knew your family wouldn’t collect any junk.’ Excitedly he called out to his henchmen to join the ceremony. What happened then we know only from an account given by a Jewish charlady who witnessed the scene through a door left slightly ajar.

  Hinda, naked and in pain, was forced to put a burning match to two candles that had been placed in the candlesticks. According to the distraught witness, the moment she did this, two enormous black tongues of flame burst from the sacred objects. My aunt’s face turned ash-pale, and she started to chant not the blessing for light but the mourner’s prayer: ‘Magnified and sanctified be His great name...’ She stopped abruptly, hit the floor, and never got up.

  Surreal

  Today, Herszke Goldstern, a 41-year-old worker, hanged himself in his apartment at 16 Wróbla Street. Adolf Epstein, aged 42, resettled here from Sudetenland, also hanged himself in his apartment at 35 Zawiszy Street. The mother, 43, of Fajga Paciorek, a school friend of mine, jumped from a third-storey window at 63 Lutomierska Street. And Julius Borhard, in his mid-seventies, slashed his veins and leapt from the window of the old people’s home.

  A major arrest was made. A plainclothes policeman discovered a secret workshop producing pancakes from rotten vegetables and potatoes retrieved from garbage. The two families involved, residing at 13 Lwowska Street, were preparing this delicacy most probably for profit; both families were arrested by order of the public prosecutor. In the course of the investigation the prisoners denied that they had engaged in the sale of the pancakes, but one of their children spilled the beans. ‘We employed a salesman,’ the little boy innocently revealed.

  Last night, at the House of Culture, the concert conducted by David Bajgelman played to a capacity audience. Chairman Rumkowski, flanke
d by his faithful entourage, sat in the front row. The orchestra accompanied a singer in her rendition of some Yiddish songs, then presented several works from the classical repertoire. The climax was a rousing performance of a Beethoven piano concerto.

  At the conclusion of the program a delighted chairman made a fine speech appropriate to the occasion. Afterwards, Rumkowski took aside one of his trusted assistants, Szaja Stanisław Jakobson, and asked him to summon the soloist.

  ‘Di host shain geshpielt,’ he told the young man in Yiddish. ‘You played well. But why do you look so pale?’

  ‘I lost my wife, sir, to typhus, just two weeks ago,’ the pianist answered nervously. ‘I lost her,’ he repeated.

  ‘I know how it feels,’ said the chairman. ‘I also lost my beautiful wife, in the prime of her life. She used to sing the Yiddish songs I heard here tonight.’ Rumkowski had tears in his eyes. Briskly he turned to his assistant. ‘Szaja,’ he shouted, ‘see that the muzykant gets a double portion of soup for the next two weeks. And make sure the doctor gives him a script for a weekly ration of potato-peels, but from the police kitchen — don’t forget, Szaja, it must only be from the police kitchen.’

  The night outside was windy and drizzly when the chairman left the concert hall. I happened to be standing nearby. In his dark coat, and with thick black-rimmed spectacles perched on his Roman nose, Rumkowski appeared to me like a lonely owl. Despite his sixty-odd years, he climbed quite nimbly into his droshka. He signalled to the coachman and the brown old nag took off. I don’t know why, but the rhythmic clatter of its hoofs made me think of a wagon rumbling towards an ever-hungry guillotine.

  Family Friends

  The Rabanovs were old family friends. Josef had been my father’s comrade-in-arms at the time of the 1905 revolution. They had stood shoulder to shoulder defending the barricade on Wschodnia Street, in the city of the waterless river, against the onslaught of the Tsar’s cossacks. Josef was unusually tall, and therefore known among the conspirators as ‘Long Jos’, while father was ‘Little Gershon’. Both were textile weavers by profession.

  Despite his proletarian status, Josef was always immaculately dressed: black jacket, dark pinstriped trousers and, on weekends, aristocratic white gloves. A yellowish smudge on his thick silver-grey moustache betrayed his addiction to tobacco. His wife Berenice was a petite brunette, well-shaped, with long brown hair, deep-set eyes and a face like that of a white porcelain doll. Berenice always wore a black shirt-dress trimmed with white silk, and spoke with a throaty but pleasing voice accompanied by lively gesticulation — often she would shape her hands and long fingers into a ball, as if to round off her message or perhaps lend global meaning to her thoughts. She had once been a celebrated actress on the Yiddish stage, where she learnt the beautiful art of merging truth with imagination. The simplest utterance, when imbued with her diction and style, became a festive, a Godly event.

  I never tired of hearing her memorable story about the opening night of a well-known drama. ‘We premiered in a disused hall, and as the curtain rose, revealing a dilapidated little synagogue where two starved disciples pondered the coming of the Messiah, a stray black cat happened to cross the stage, stopped in the centre, scanned the astonished audience with resentful green eyes, then haughtily lifted its bushy tail and continued on. The morning papers were mad with excitement, praising this accidental occurrence as the dramatic effect of the twentieth century!’

  The Rabanovs were childless and very much in love. Josef, not unlike his biblical predecessor, was full of dreams; some of them even came to fruition. My father, an incurable sceptic, grew to love his friend’s fantasies in the ghetto — perhaps, in our hopelessness, they offered relief from the futilities of everyday life. Although the war radically changed the pattern of our existence, the Rabanovs kept visiting us twice a week, on Sundays and Wednesdays after work, as they had always done.

  December 1942 was a gloomy month. The devastating news from the front choked what was left of our waning spirit. In the north, the Germans lay like a boa at the throat of our allies’ great city of Leningrad. Moscow was about to do a Kutuzov. The harsh winter got into father’s bones and froze his joints; the pain was excruciating and he took to his bed. On his visits Josef would sit hunched in a chair beside him. ‘Gershon, listen,’ he would announce excitedly, ‘I had another dream, a glorious dream. I saw a mighty army, like some terrible primordial glacier, rise out of Moscow. It advanced with incredible speed, overrunning the panic-stricken Germans, squashing them like lice.’ My father would shake his head: ‘Oh Jos, Jos, will it ever come to pass?’ ‘It will, Gershon, it will, and we’ll be there to see it!’

  The long hard winter that year was accompanied by a cruel famine, a famine that produced a bountiful harvest of death. It catapulted the gravediggers into an enviable elite: people gave away their last crumb of bread just to have their loved ones buried. One Thursday in late January it snowed all day long, and that night there was a knock on our door. It was Berenice. She looked distraught, and I knew something horrible had happened. Taking mother aside, she began in a hushed voice, though the dancing shadows of her gesticulating hands on the dimly-lit wall spoke clearly enough of an insurmountable inner struggle. Soon she had abandoned her whispers. ‘How could he, how could he do this?’ she cried.

  ‘You have to talk to him,’ mother was saying. ‘To steal bread in ghetto—’

  ‘Oh please, please, don’t use that word — my Josef is no thief!... I knew I shouldn’t have come here, but I just had to share my anguish with someone...’

  ‘You mustn’t despair,’ mother tried to console her. ‘It’s become an almost daily occurrence.’

  ‘Yes — and after all, it was only me he took the bread from, and he says he was going to replace it as soon as he got his next ration...’

  Well, Josef was unable to tame his hunger, and a darkness descended upon the Rabanovs’ once loving relationship, a painful estrangement. Virtually overnight the upright heroic dreamer became a klepsydra — ghetto term for a walking death-notice — and the lively Berenice had become the tragic protagonist of a miscarried drama. The Rabanovs stopped visiting our home. My parents suffered, for they loved their lifelong friends and father missed Josef ’s sanguine effervescence.

  Dad was the oldest Bundist in the ghetto, so when the party celebrated its forty-sixth jubilee he was asked to deliver a lecture. It took place in an attic somewhere on Łagiewnicka Street; his topic was Yiddish and Socialism. Towards the end of father’s speech a smart-alec in the audience called out: ‘Comrade Gershon, perhaps you might like to tell us, which are you first, a Yid or a socialist?’ My father didn’t skip a beat. ‘As far as I know,’ he replied, ‘I was circumcised before I ever heard of Karl Marx.’ The room broke into laughter. Afterwards, as an expression of gratitude for a well-delivered oration, the organizers bestowed on father a magnificent prize: a voucher from the Bund kitchen for two kilos of potato-peels. Next day I redeemed the voucher. Mother immediately set to work, and in no time had produced a cake fit for a royal feast. When she was about to serve, she asked me to run across to the Rabanovs and ask them to join us in this unexpected banquet.

  The door to their flat was not locked, but the threshold was ice. Inside, the windows were covered with dark curtains, the walls coated with a glistening frost. There was not a stick of furniture in the place, except for the wrought-iron bed on which the Rabanovs were resting. I approached on tiptoe, so as not to wake them too abruptly.

  They lay in an inseparable embrace, Josef with wide-open bewildered eyes and Berenice with her face buried in her husband’s breast. Her graceful arms, thin and lily-white, were pleated around his neck like a noble wreath of forgiveness.

  Red Rebecca

  My niece Frumetl attended the same kindergarten as I did, but sixteen years later. What is remarkable about that is the fact that we both took our first steps in the outside world under the guidance of the same teacher. Miss Fela, adored by us less for her rare intellect
than for the special sense of safety she radiated, was of indeterminate age. In her eyes she carried the love of an angel; on her small back she carried a prominent hump.

  Until the middle of 1942 she still ran her kindergarten at 34 Zgierska Street, though after Rumkowski’s ‘Give me your children’ speech, she was left with just one little girl, Frumetl. As things went from bad to worse, as Germans in collusion with our local agents kept snooping about the clandestine kindergartens, my sister preferred to keep her child in a dark unused room with a rusty old padlock on the door.

  I nevertheless returned every fortnight, as I always had, to visit my teacher of old. In Miss Fela’s kindergarten room stood an aquarium, where, once beloved of all the children, Red Rebecca still hid among the weeds of her green world. On my visits I would change the water and clean the aquarium. In former days it had been a great honour for any child to be in charge of Red Rebecca’s needs, since the goldfish was regarded by all as a real person.

  I enjoyed coming to see the teacher of my formative years. Despite the difficulties and the shortages, there was always a hot cup of tea, a slice of brown cake baked from burnt wheatchaff, and a good talk. On one such occasion, as she looked out through a small window upon our narrow world, Miss Fela observed: ‘Those who believed that, thanks to education, brutality would become a thing of the past, made a mistake with a capital M. It seems to me that man’s insanity is carried along by its own peculiar inertia.’

  It is January 1943, an unbearably frosty winter morning. The angel of death, white and freezing, is impatiently jumping up and down on people’s doorsteps. I run up the kindergarten stairs. The door stands surprisingly open. I dash in. Miss Fela is sitting on a low chair; as usual she is wearing her white dresscoat. But droplets of sweat prickle her cheerless face. Her thin white lips are like death, and her large eyes are brimming with tears; they direct my gaze to the aquarium. Red Rebecca, openeyed, is lying on her side, virtually encased in ice.