Our students too were natural masters of the cloak-and-dagger. They entered the house from the side door and travelled in small groups or alone. Once inside, I ushered them into the ‘classroom’ and quietly closed the cupboard door. They carried encyclopaedias tucked deep inside works of German literature so that the soldiers would be convinced they were learning the language of the new Reich. We sat cross-legged on a rug on the floor, Turkish style: there were no desks or furniture that hinted of a school, in case the Germans stormed in. When lessons were over, I would let the children out one by one into the fields, where they came under Anton’s watchful eye. They never went down the main lane where German soldiers patrolled, sometimes pausing at Polish homes and eating their bacon and drinking their beer and complimenting them for learning German and only occasionally, if provoked by boredom or beauty, raping their daughters.
The knock at our house came with the first snow of the season, in the middle of the night. When I awoke, the curtains were irradiated by the brightest of white lights. I thought dawn had broken with a vengeance and Anton was calling for help with the milking. Stumbling from bed, I looked out the window on a vista more North Pole than southern Poland, the covering of snow ghostlier still by the light of a gibbous moon. I followed a series of freshly dimpled tracks leading off the main road and my eyes sloped to rest at a sleigh stopped in front of the barn.
I crept downstairs towards voices, but stopped halfway at the sight of police trousers and boots on the front door step. Anton was holding a candle, a coat wrapped over his pyjamas. Despite the cold air flicking the flame of his wick, he had not asked the Gendarme to come inside.
‘Very sorry to be banging you up in the middle of the night,’ the man said, shaking his plump jowls. ‘But I’ve received intelligence about your daughters’ safety it would be foolish not to look into.’
‘My girls are all tucked up in bed,’ Anton said. ‘We appreciate your concern, Master Gendarme, but I’m afraid you’ve been misinformed.’
‘If the young ones share a room with Eva, they may be in more danger than you know.’
‘Now you’re talking in riddles.’
The Gendarme inserted a snow-baked foot into the rapidly closing gap. ‘I’ve had reports Eva has been giving the other two lessons in Slavic language and history, which is a serious offence against the Reich.’
‘The self-same language you’re speaking now, you mean.’
‘That is not the point. The law is the law.’
‘Reports from who?’
‘Not the usual gossip-monger, or I wouldn’t be here.’ The Gendarme shook snow off his boot. ‘Maybe I’d turn a blind eye if this nonsense were just within the family. But from what I hear, Eva’s got half the boys from the village at it. Secret classroom, notepads, books, the whole works. If you know about this, old friend, now’s the time to speak up.’
‘Anton knows nothing.’ I came down the last two steps into the candlelight. ‘It’s all my fault.’
‘Damien Plotz?’ the Gendarme said, unfazed by my appearance.
‘At your service. The lessons were all my idea, the cupboard under the stairs, everything.’ I turned to Anton. ‘I’m sorry, cousin. I just couldn’t bear to see the children growing up without an education.’
The Gendarme chuckled. His was a broad, gap-toothed face that in other circumstances could have been regarded as friendly. ‘So it’s true. I hardly believed it myself.’
‘Half true. Eva’s involvement is idle gossip, nothing more. I simply offered to keep the children from getting under her feet as she chored. Eva knew nothing of any lessons, and would have thrown me out if she had.’
‘My cousin has been invalided these past few weeks, with too much time on his hands,’ Anton said. ‘I’d thought the injury was to his ankle, but evidently it was his head we should’ve had examined.’
‘And what a head it must be,’ the Gendarme said. ‘To plunder so many languages while the rest of us can only manage one. You also know German, I take it?’
‘Naturally. Hamburg is my home.’
‘You won’t mind if I verify that while I’m here. Identification papers, please, Herr Plotz.’
I did not know what to say. Anton had talked about getting me forged papers in the city, but the venture had so far come to nothing.
‘Lost,’ he said. ‘Unfortunately he got a little drunk at Petr’s Inn and misplaced his wallet.’
‘Making quite the fool of himself with the general cavorting, so I heard.’
I confessed to my crimes against the polka, for I could hardly have worsened my plight.
‘Oh well,’ the Gendarme said. ‘I’ll just have to take him, as is.’
Anton said, ‘You’re taking him?’
‘If what cousin Dani says is true, Eva will be able to remain here with her sisters. Unless you want me to take them all, of course, for a speedier exoneration?’
‘Eva is innocent of all charges,’ I said. ‘Just as I am guilty.’
‘Good man,’ the Gendarme said. ‘You’ll go a long way. Now go and wrap up nice and warm, it’s bitter out.’
And that was how it happened. What could I do? If I made any attempt to shimmy down the drainpipe, the girls would be taken in my place. So I dressed for my punishment, in the shabbiest clothes available. At least I would spare Anton the loss of a good suit.
A studied calm settled over me in those final few minutes. Perhaps prompted by the snow’s vivid gleam at the window, I believed I had been granted a rare moment of insight. I had been on the run since leaving Kiel in the winter of 1938. Soon I would be at rest. All things considered, I had been shielded from many of the horrors visited upon my people. My experience was largely a closeted one. Even now, as the sands of time were running out, my disguise as a German meant that I was treated with a remarkable degree of civility. I could ask for nothing more.
When I descended the stairs five minutes later, all the Popolowskis were clustered in the kitchen, sobbing. Only our embraces spoke as I passed from one to the other, until I came to Eva’s shoulders, last and for the longest. ‘Be strong for me,’ I breathed into her coconut hair. ‘You are the glue that binds this house together.’
The Gendarme’s hand steered me out the door into the harsh solar glare. Where the sleigh had looked empty, there now sat a large SS officer holding the huskies’ reins. I supposed I was to be transferred into his custody, where the civility would end. As we approached, the Gendarme opened the side latch, bundled me in to the front seat next to the German, and then squeezed in at my side, his fleshy thigh on quite intimate terms with my own as he squirmed to close the door. He introduced the German as Untersturmführer Amon Goethe, a name I had not heard before.
‘Well,’ the Gendarme prompted with a dig to the ribs, displeased at my silence. ‘Convey to my colleague the excellent news.’
‘Y-yes,’ I stammered. ‘Umm… what news?’
The Gendarme sighed, and proceeded to explain in a sing-song voice as if talking to a dim-witted child. ‘Your name would be a good place to start. That you are the man we’ve been looking for. That you speak fluent Polish and Belorussian in addition to German, and that you are a resident of Hamburg.’
I understood from this that the Gendarme spoke little German himself, and that I was expected to translate news of my own capture. Having little choice in the matter, I obliged. Goethe continued to stare at his dogs as I spoke, his head jerking curtly at my qualifications. I finished to the sound of the wind sculpting snowdrifts, and was prompted again by the irritated voice on my right.
‘And that it is an honour to ride in the Untersturmführer’s cabin.’
Once delivered, my translation had the intended effect of spurring Goethe into action. He tugged his reins and the huskies began transcribing a wide arc through the snow that led us back onto the main village road.
As we left Anton’s property, I noticed two enormous sleighs fall in some twenty yards at our rear, empty with only six policemen between
them. Even so, I wondered why such a show of force was needed to arrest one teacher.
The three sleighs continued to plough snow; twenty minutes became thirty and thirty became forty. On the hill tops, the temperature plummeted. When Goethe stopped under a tree to urinate, the Gendarme reached behind and retrieved two blankets, one of which he placed on the driver’s seat and the second over his own knees.
‘We’ll get you one later,’ he said to me. ‘Finest hand-woven woollen throw. Jewish specialty of the region.’
The further we travelled, the more relentlessly the German drove his dogs. A tense expectancy gripped our cabin as the two men studied the lunar landscape. I couldn’t understand what they were waiting for. If they were going to execute me, one frozen hillside was as good as any other. The policemen behind us wouldn’t even need to dig a hole. I would lie entombed within the drift until the first thaw of spring. In my last allotment of time, my thoughts turned to the identity of Eva’s betrayer, the Gendarme’s source. How strange that somebody had implicated Anton’s own flesh and blood, his eldest daughter no less, in place of Cousin Dami. I could only imagine that somebody had heard how close the two of us had become, and wished to render us apart. Had heard, or perhaps seen, from the vantage point of a bar-stool opposite Petr’s Inn on a Saturday evening several weeks ago. Ilya Legrino, the only man in the village for whom death was a business plan. Why would Eva’s suitor turn denouncer? Love during wartime was a dark and twisted flower. Anton had told me of a couple in Lublin who had hidden a Jew in their attic. Alone in the house all day, the wife and the Jew fell in love. The woman betrayed her own husband to the Germans. The Gestapo arrived, took her husband away, killed him, and she lived with the Jew. That weekend, the Jew had a heart attack.
13
The wooden synagogue grew out of the distant village like a mountain. Constructed on a square plan, its stepped pyramidal roof was unmistakable to my well-trained eye, and to Amon Goethe, who stood erect over the reins as we surfed the final mile. His blanket fell to the floor as he rose. I did not offer to pick it up.
Our dogs skidded to a halt by the synagogue steps but the other two sleighs raced along the sides and stopped at the back. I heard the six policemen crunch down and disappear into the loose settlement of houses. Lights went on in bedroom windows, shouts cried out, and there were several loud crashes. The policemen went from door to door, rousting inhabitants.
Several minutes later, they returned to parade a column of sixteen dazed souls in nightgowns and long-johns: three children, a few young adults, and the rest adults of my age and older. One dignified grandmother wore nothing but a prayer shawl draped around her bony shoulders. While the ragged band passed our sleigh, I studied each face for signs of familiarity, but found none.
There was some misunderstanding, I wanted to tell the Gendarme. These people were innocent. They had nothing to do with my teaching.
The policemen herded them up the steps into the synagogue. When the prisoners were browbeaten into silence inside, we followed Goethe out of the sleigh and up into the temple. Pausing at the memorial board, I could see down the aisle to where the villagers stood around the bimah’s pedestal in the centre.
Goethe strode past them towards the far end and I feared he might deign to address us from the rabbi’s seat, but he stopped at the open end of the bimah and produced a black leather notebook from his tunic pocket. Using the eternal light of the menorah, he flicked through the first half of his book until he found an empty page. He wrote the date in a precise, elegant script, November 19th, 1941 and then paused, nodding at me.
‘Names,’ the Gendarme hissed at my side.
‘Damien Plotz.’
‘Not you, fool,’ the Gendarme said and pointed. ‘Them.’
I turned to the nearest Jew and asked his name, which I then repeated to the expectant Goethe, who added it to his book. In this manner, I went around the circle, Goethe pausing only to clarify the spelling of a particularly troublesome Semitic syllable. The adults in the group appeared relieved by the German’s adherence to bureaucratic procedure and proudly offered their names. I, too, started to breathe more deeply between names. This was a registration or census, nothing more. But then I came to the first child, a slip of a girl cleaving to her mother’s leg. Instead of recording her name, Goethe wrote ‘ein Stuck’ (one thing). After all Jews except me had been accounted for, I watched Goethe tally his column. At the bottom of the page, he wrote, ‘Drei Stuck unter sixteen jahr alt’.
Tucking the book back inside his tunic, Goethe smiled at me and said, ‘As enemy of the Reich, and in accordance with the Führer’s will, you are hereby sentenced to death.’
When he turned back to the Jews at the bimah, I understood that the proclamation was not meant for me, but for them. I had been employed for the night as a translator. From the pained expressions on the villagers’ faces, they had already understood and did not require my linguistic services. A curly haired youth with a bloody lip who had been staring intently at me for the last minute raised a trembling finger and jabbed it in my direction when I finished.
‘Why are you doing this?’ he shouted.
Goethe ordered the Belorussian to make a final head-count. While he did so, the curly youth continued to drill through to the back of my skull. His quarrel was not with the police, but specifically with me. Somehow he knew I belonged with the others at the bimah. When the Gendarme was done, Goethe removed his book and ensured that the number present corresponded to the written entry. Satisfied, his signalled for the policemen to lead the Jews out to the rear of building, behind where the Torah ark lay.
There was only one-way this was going to end. I had sentenced the villagers to death and now I would be forced to witness their execution. As the Gendarme and I filed out at the rear of the column, I stumbled, held myself against the pulpit and muttered a prayer of strength. If I broke down now, Amon Goethe would know the truth about his new translator, and those who had sheltered me would be next for his little black book. With every fibre I could summon, I held myself together and headed towards the door, eyes fixed on the empty balcony above.
Outside, I followed the line down the steps and around the side of vestibule. The snow had blown deep against the wall here, and I made a pantomime of losing my shoe in the drift. The Gendarme shrugged at Schott in apology for my clumsiness. As expected, neither man waited. I collapsed to my knees when they had cleared the far corner, and pressed my fingers to my ears. Muffled, I could still hear the policemen’s crude oaths and the terrified cries of the children. From their parents and elders, only silence now. I was sure I heard the Gendarme call out for me, although it might have been the final order, because very soon after a volley of shots rang out. When the firing ceased, I unplugged my fingers and strained my ears against the wind. The children’s cries had stopped.
I followed the leaking trails of smoke to the back of the synagogue, but the guns were only resting. The men of the village had been made to watch their loved ones die, a spectacle that had left many of their leggings stained with urine. Women and children first, I thought, the old seafaring command from stories of yore. Black blood pulsed amongst the tangle of sprawled limbs as the policemen picked over the remains, looting jewels and headscarves. At the Gendarme’s orders, one of his officers pulled the prayer shawl from the old woman’s shoulders, neatly folded the garment in two and handed it to me.
‘For the ride home,’ the Gendarme said.
When the bodies were plucked clean, the menfolk were forced to heap their wives, children and mothers into one of the waiting vehicles, before receiving a shot to back of the head. They lay where they fell, friends and family slumped together, a sleigh of broken dolls.
14
In every life there are events that redraw the contours of one’s sense of existence. Afterward, all is lost. The past becomes inaccessible, like an island at full tide. For me, the cut off point was the night of November 19th, 1941. I had encountered death before, in the g
uise of Ronan Kesselman’s hanging for attempted escape. I had read the Chaze’s purloined reports about the pits at Ponary, but that was a distinctively Lithuanian phenomenon, I had told myself, particular to a certain time and place. But to spend a night participating, however tangentially, in the mass slaughter of innocent civilians was an encounter to rupture the soul.
I do not remember the sleigh ride home, nor the jokes I translated between Goethe and the Belorussian, giddy as schoolboys after the night’s successful liquidation. The other two vehicles did not follow behind, nor did I enquire after them.
We returned along a deserted main road, by-passing Anton’s village altogether to enter the south-east outskirts of the city of Lublin, where I finally expected to be locked up in a German cell. Instead, we stopped at a crossroad in front of a small train station.
‘Gentlemen,’ Goethe said. ‘Until the morning.’
‘Goodnight, sir.’ The Belorussian gestured for me to translate. ‘I take it you were satisfied with my guards.’
The German sniffed and dabbed a white handkerchief to his nose. ‘They served their purpose.’
The Gendarme stepped out onto the snowy road and stood there holding the cabin door open. I was also expected to disembark. With his other hand, he pointed out a large house on the opposite corner, a civilian home with a wall and a flower garden.
Goethe pulled on his reigns and the sleigh resumed its glide into the city. After watching him disappear, I turned to study the house that the Gendarme was walking towards, digging keys from his pocket.
‘You’ll do mostly interpreting for the Untersturmführer,’ he said.
‘In the evenings, you’ll teach me to speak the language. Unfortunately it’s impossible for a man of my background to advance up the ladder without adequate German.’
He stopped at his gate, waiting for me to catch up.
Against every instinct, my feet started delivering me to the pavement.
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