by Herman Wouk
“Yir zeit a yiddishe tochter, nane?” (“You’re a Jewish daughter, no?”)
“Richtig. Und ver zeit ir?” (“Right. And who are you?”)
The Galician Yiddish, toughly rapped out, falls on his ears like song. He gives straight answers to Bronka’s probing questions.
The two bearded cooks stirring the soup vats exchange winks at the Yiddish gabble. Bronka Ginsberg is an old story to them. Long ago the major dragged this thin-lipped, hard-faced creature out of the family camp of Jews up in the mountains, to nurse men wounded in a raid. Now the damned Jew-bitch bosses the whole show. But she is a skilled nurse, and nobody makes trouble about her. For one thing Sidor Nikonov would shoot any man who looked cross-eyed at the woman.
As she jaws away in Yiddish with the infiltrator, the cooks lose interest. Since the fellow is a Yid, he can’t really be an infiltrator; so they won’t get to take him out in the woods and shoot him. She’ll see to that. Too bad. It can be fun when they beg for mercy. These two are Ukrainian peasants drafted into the band; in the cook dugout they stay warm, fill their bellies, and avoid the food raids and railroad dynamitings. They loathe Bronka Ginsberg but aren’t about to cross her.
Why, she is asking Jastrow, didn’t he tell his captors the truth? The partisans know about the mass graves; why did he make up that yarn about Ternopol? Glancing at the cooks, he says she ought to know how treacherous the Ukrainian backwoods are, worse even than in Lithuania. The Benderovce gangs are just as apt to kill a Jew as to feed him or to let him go on his way. In Auschwitz some of the worst guards were Ukrainians. So he invented that story. Other partisan bands have believed him and given him food. Why is he tied up here like a dog?
Bronka Ginsberg explains that a unit of turncoat Russian soldiers led by Germans infiltrated the ravine a week ago to destroy Nikonov’s band. One fellow doublecrossed the Fritzes, and alerted the partisans. They ambushed the outfit, killed most of them, and have been hunting the stragglers ever since. Jastrow is lucky, she says, that he wasn’t shot at sight.
Berel is untied and fed. Later in the command dugout he repeats his story in Russian to Major Nikonov and the political officer, Comrade Polchenko, a wizened man with black teeth. Bronka Ginsberg sits by, sewing. The officers make Berel cut the slender aluminum cylinders containing the film rolls out of his coat lining. They are peering at the cylinders by the oil lamp when the evening Central Partisan Staff broadcast from Moscow starts up. They put aside the film containers to listen. Through a square wooden box that whistles and squeals, dispatch orders come gargling out in plain language to various code-named detachments; also cheery bulletins about a victory west of recaptured Kharkov, big bombing raids on Germany, and the surrender of Italy.
Their discussion about Berel resumes. The political officer is for sending the films to Moscow in the next ammunition delivery plane, and turning the Jew loose. Major Nikonov is against that; the films will get lost or nobody will know what they mean. If the films go to Moscow, the Jew should be sent along.
The major is curt with Polchenko. Political officers in partisan detachments are an irritation. Most of these bands consist of Red Army soldiers trapped behind German lines who have taken to the woods to survive. They attack enemy units or the local gendarmerie to seize food, arms, and ammunition, or to take revenge for peasants who are punished for helping them. But the heroic partisan stories are propaganda romance, by and large; these men have mostly turned forest animals, thinking first of their safety. This does not suit Moscow, naturally; hence men like Polchenko have been airlifted to the partisan forests, to stir up activity and see that Central Staff orders are obeyed.
As it happens, Nikonov’s band is a brave and venturesome one, with a good record of sabotaging German communications. Nikonov himself is a regular Red Army officer, thinking of his own future once the tide of war has turned. But the Carpathians are far from Moscow, and the Red Army is far from the Carpathians. The Soviet bureaucracy, represented by the black-toothed man, doesn’t swing much weight; Nikonov is boss here. So Berel Jastrow observes, listening anxiously to the talk. Polchenko is civil, almost ingratiating, as he argues with the leader.
Bronka Ginsberg looks up from her sewing. “You’re both talking nonsense. Why bother with this fellow? What’s he to us? Did Moscow ask for him or his films? Send him up to Levine’s camp. They’ll feed him, and then he can go on to Prague, or to the devil. If his Prague contact can really reach the Americans, then maybe the New York Times will have a story about the heroic Sidor Nikonov band. Eh?” She turns on Berel. “Wouldn’t you give Major Nikonov credit? And his partisan detachment, that’s blowing up Fritz’s trains and bridges all over the western Ukraine?”
“I will get to Prague,” says Berel, “and the Americans will hear about the Nikonov partisan brigade.”
Major Nikonov’s band is far from a brigade — a mere four hundred men, loosely held together by Nikonov. The word pleases him.
“All right, take him to Levine tomorrow,” he says to Bronka. “You can use mules. The fellow’s half-dead.”
“Oh, he’ll drag his own carcass up the mountain, don’t worry.”
The political officer makes a disgusted face, shakes his head, and spits in the dirt.
Dr. Levine’s Jews, refugees from the last massacre in Zhitomir, are squatting in a tumbledown hunters’ camp by a small lake, not far from the Slovakian border. The carpenters have long since repaired the leaky roofs of the abandoned cabins and main lodge, sealed the walls, put in shutters, knocked together rough furniture, and made a habitable retreat for the survivors of some eighty families, much reduced by frost, malnutrition, and disease in their long westward trek. Sidor Nikonov raided these Jews when they first came here, took most of their food and weapons, and dragged off Bronka. Bronka pointed out to him, after her rape, that Levine’s men are craftsmen spared by the Germans in Zhitomir; electricians, carpenters, blacksmiths, mechanics, a gunsmith, a baker, a watchmaker, and the like. Ever since, the partisans have supplied food, clothing, bullets, and weapons to the Jews — very little, but sufficient to keep them alive and able to fight off intruders — and in return the Jews have serviced their machines, fashioned new weapons, made crude bombs, and repaired their generators and signal equipment. They are like a maintenance battalion, very useful.
The partnership has paid off both ways. Once when an SS patrol, tipped off by an anti-Semite down in the flats, climbed the mountain to scoop in the Jews, Nikonov warned them. They melted into the woods with their children, their aged, and their sick. The Germans found an empty camp. While they were still engaged in stealing everything they could lift, Nikonov’s men fell on them and murdered them all. Germans have not come again looking for Jews. On the other hand, while Nikonov was off attacking a troop train, a gang of renegade Ukrainians happened upon his dugouts, and in a brief fierce fight with the guards set fire to the weapons cache. It burned for hours, leaving a smoking pile of twisted red-hot gun barrels. The Jews straightened the barrels, repaired the firing mechanisms, made new stocks, and restored the weapons to Nikonov’s arsenal, usable again in a fashion until he could steal more guns.
Such are the stories that Bronka Ginsberg tells Jastrow while toiling up the mountain trail. “Sidor Nikonov is really not a bad man, for a goy,” she sums up, sighing. “Not a wild beast like some. But my grandfather was a rabbi in Bryansk. My father was the president of the Zhitomir Zionists. And look at me, will you? A forest wife. Ivan Ivanovitch’s whore.”
Jastrow says, “You are an aishess khayil.”
Bronka, ahead of him on the trail, looks back at him, her weatherbeaten face coloring, her eyes moist. Aishess khayil, from the Book of Proverbs, means “woman of valor,” the ultimate religious praise for a Jewess.
Late that night, the only woman in the council circle at the lodge is Bronka Ginsberg. The other firelit faces, except for the clean-shaven doctor’s, are bearded, rough, and grim. “Tell them about the chains,” she says. Her face is as hard as any man’s
there. “And about the dogs. Give them the picture.”
Jastrow is talking to the executive committee of Dr. Levine’s band, seated around a big stone fireplace where massive logs blaze. The prompting is helpful. What with the long climb and the bellyful of bread and soup, he is dropping off with fatigue.
Blobel’s Jews had to work in chains, he relates, after his pal broke free, seized a gun, and shot some SS guards. Every fourth man in the gang, counted off at random, was hanged; the rest were chained in sections by the neck, with ankle chains on each man. The number of guard dogs was doubled.
Still, the escape of his section was planned for months. They waited for two minimum simultaneous conditions: a river nearby, and a heavy rainstorm. They worked during those months on their chains with screwdrivers, keys, picks, and other tools filched from the clothes of the dead. Though they were a sick, beaten, frightened lot, they knew that they were overdue to be shot and burned up, so the feeblest of them was game to try the break.
A thunderstorm just before sunset, in the woods outside Ternopol, at a mass grave on a bluff near the Seret River, gave them their chance. A thousand bodies, piled up on two frames with timber and waste oil, had just been put to the torch. The cloudburst caused dense dark clouds of stinking smoke to roll over the SS men, who backed off with their dogs. Jastrow’s gang shed its chains amid the smoke and downpour, scattered into the woods, and made for the river. As Jastrow scrambled and slid down the bluff he heard the dogs, and shouts, and shots, and screams; but he reached the water and plunged in. He allowed the current to sweep him far downstream, and crawled ashore on the other side in darkness. Next morning, groping through dense dripping woods, he came on two other escapees, Polish Jews who were heading for their home towns, hoping for food and concealment there. As to the others, he feels that perhaps half got away, but he never saw them again.
“You still have the films?” asks Dr. Levine, a round-faced, black-haired man in his thirties, dressed in a patched Wehrmacht uniform. With his rimless glasses and kindly smile he looks like a city intellectual rather than the leader of the roughnecks around the fire. According to Bronka, he is a gynecologist, and also a dental surgeon. In the mountain hamlets, and in the villages down in the flats, the inhabitants like Levine: he will come great distances to treat their sick.
“Yes, I have them.”
“You’ll let Ephraim develop them?” Levine jerks a thumb at a long-nosed man with red whiskers bristling all over his face. “Ephraim is our photography specialist. Also a professor of physics. Then we can have a look at them.”
“Yes.”
“Good. When you’re stronger, we’ll send you on to people who’ll get you over the border.”
The red-whiskered man says, “Do the pictures show the crematoriums?”
“I don’t know.”
“Who took them? And with what?”
“Auschwitz has thousands of cameras. Mountains of film.” Berel’s reply is weak and weary. “Auschwitz is the biggest treasure house in the world, all the stuff robbed from our dead people. Jewish girls sit in thirty big warehouses, sorting out the loot. It’s all supposed to go back to Germany, but the SS steals a lot. We steal, too. There is a very good Czech underground. They are good Jews, those Czechs. They are tough, and they stick together. They stole the cameras and the films. They took the pictures.” Berel Jastrow is so tired that as he talks his eyes droop, and he half-dreams, and seems to see Auschwitz’s long rows of horse stalls in floodlit snow, the trudging bent Jews in their striped suits, and the big “Canada” warehouses with the loot piled up outside them under snow-covered tarpaulins, and in the distance dark chimneys vomiting flames and black smoke.
“Let him rest,” he hears Dr. Levine say. “Put him in with Ephraim.”
Berel has not lain in a bed for weeks. The straw mattress and the ragged blanket in a rude three-tier bunk are blissful luxury. He sleeps and sleeps. When he wakes an old woman brings him hot soup with bread. He eats and dozes again. Two days of this and he is up and about, bathing in the lake at high noon when the sun warms the icy water, then walking around the camp dressed in the German winter uniform Ephraim gives him. It is a curiously peaceful scene, this lakeside cluster of mountain cabins surrounded by peaks russet with autumn. Ragged clothes dry in the sun, women scrub, sew, cook, and gossip, men in small workshops saw and hammer and clank, a blacksmith makes his forge blaze as little children watch. Older children drone in open-air classes: Bible, mathematics, Zionist history, even Talmud. There are few books, no pencils, no paper; the instruction is rote oral repetition in Yiddish. The pinch-faced shabby children look as bored and harassed here as in any schoolroom, and here as everywhere some are at surreptitious mischief. The Talmud boys sit in a circle around one large tome, some reading aloud from the upside-down text.
Young men and women armed with rifles patrol the camp. Ephraim tells Berel that radio-equipped sentinels are posted far down the trails and passes. The camp is not likely to be surprised. The armed guards can take care of infiltrators or small bands, but for protection from serious threats they must signal Nikonov. Their best young people are gone. They wanted vengeance for the killings at Zhitomir; some have joined Kovpak’s famous partisan regiment, others the one led by the legendary Jew, Uncle Moisha. Dr. Levine approved their going.
In the week that Berel stays he hears a flood of stories, most of them horrible, a few heroic, some funny, drawn from the Jewish forest grapevine. He too has his adventures to relate. In this way, as he is reminiscing at supper one evening about his days with the early Jewish partisans outside Minsk, he learns that his own son is alive! There is no mistake about it. A skinny, pimply young fellow with an eyepatch, who served with Kovpak until a German grenade half-blinded him, marched with a Mendel Jastrow, through the Ukraine for months. So it comes out that not only is Mendel alive, but a partisan — quiet Mendel, the super-religious yeshiva boy — and that the daughter-in-law and her child, from what this young fellow last heard, are in hiding on a peasant’s farm outside Volozhin.
This is the first word Berel has had of his family in two years of wanderings and imprisonment. Through all the abuse, pain, and hunger that have ground him down, he has never totally lost hope that things would yet turn around. He takes the news quietly, but it seems a signal that the darkest part of the dark night may be starting to pass. He feels stronger, and he is ready to forge on to Prague.
In the big room of the main lodge, the night before he leaves, Ephraim puts on a lantern-slide show for selected adults: Berel’s developed films, copied to larger slides, and flashed on a sheet gray with age and washings, through a crude projector using the arc light of two battery carbons. The sputtering and flickering of this improvised light lends a bloodcurdling animation to the slides. The naked women appear to shiver, marching into the gas chamber with their children; the prisoners wrenching gold from the corpses’ teeth under SS guard seem to heave and strain; over the long open pit, where huge rows of human bodies burn, and Sonderkommandos with meat hooks are dragging up more bodies, the smoke wavers and billows. Some pictures are too blurred to show much, but the rest tell the story of the Oswiecim camp in crushing truth.
The bad light makes the photographed documents hard to read. A long ledger page shows several hundred deaths of “heart attacks” in the same day; there are inventories of jewels, gold, furs, currency, watches, candlesticks, cameras, fountain pens, itemized and priced in neat German; six pages of a report of a medical experiment on twenty identical twins, with measurements of their response to extremes of heat, cold, and electric shock, length of time for expiring after phenol injection, and elaborate comparative anatomy statistics after autopsy. Berel Jastrow has never seen the documents nor witnessed the scenes pictured. Horrified and sorrowful, he is yet reassured to know that the material is so utterly and unanswerably damning.
Silently, those who have watched the slides trudge out of the main house, leaving only the council. Dr. Levine stares at the fire for a long t
ime. “Berel, they know me in the villages. I’ll take you over the border myself. The Jewish partisans in Slovakia are well organized, and they’ll get you to Prague.”
The train from Pardubice to Prague is crowded, the aisles of the second-class carriages jammed with standees. Czech policemen patiently work their way down the compartments, examining papers. In this docile Protectorate, betrayed at Munich, gobbled up before the war by the Germans, crushed by the reprisals for the Heydrich assassination, nothing ever turns up in the train inspections. Still, the Gestapo headquarters in Prague continues to require them.
An old man reading a German paper has to be nudged for his papers by a policeman entering the compartment. Absentmindedly he pulls out a worn wallet containing his cards and permits, and hands it over while continuing to read. Reinhold Henkle, German construction worker from Pardubice, mother’s maiden name Hungarian, which goes with the broad smooth-shaven Slavic face; the policeman glances at the threadbare suit and toilworn hands of the passenger, returns the papers, and takes the next batch. So Berel Jastrow surfaces.
The train bowls along the valley of the Elbe by the glittery river, through fruit-laden vineyards and orchards full of harvesters, and grain fields spiky with stubble. The other people in the compartment are a fat old lady with an irritated look, three young women giggling together, and a uniformed young man with crutches. This confrontation with the policeman, for which Berel rehearsed for a week, has come and gone like a quick bad joke. He has been through grotesque times, but this passage from the wild world of mass graves and mountain partisans to what he once took for everyday reality — a seat on a moving train, girls in pretty dresses diffusing cheap scent and laughing, his own tie, creased hat, white shirt that cuts his neck — what a jolt! Coming back from the dead would have to be something like this; normal life seems a mockery, a busy little make-believe game that shuts out a terrible truth beyond.