I Am Juden

by Stephen Uzzell

  ‘She did, didn’t she?’ My voice was far away and dreamy, as if I was observing from a distance. ‘I thought I imagined it.’

  ‘Want me to improve the bitch’s manners while you catch your breath?’

  ‘No thanks. I’ll handle them.’

  In the Nazi rulebook, there was only one penalty for such a brazen display.

  I found myself unholstering my pistol and slowly turning round to face the woman. The rest of the line shrank back against the baker’s window. A young man at the end started pleading with Brühl for mercy, but I could only watch my plucky assailant straighten her brittle shoulders and stare right back into my eyes.

  What else could I do, but walk up to her and stop an arm’s length away, my right hand raising my pistol, the end of the barrel finding the middle of the woman’s forehead.

  In Yiddish, I whispered, ‘God forgive me.’

  Using my other hand, I pulled back the safety catch.

  ‘Harry.’ I jerked round. Brühl said, ‘It’s Devorah Montefiore.’

  I knew the name, but I couldn’t place it.

  ‘Mother Moses, your Schindler-Jew,’ he said. ‘Come on, it’s not worth the hassle. Oskar’ll have our guts for lederhosen.’

  He pulled my arm down and prised the pistol out of my grip. I stared at my empty fingers, twitching as if charged with an electric current.

  30

  Marooned between Christmas and New Year, the next week in the office was the most quiet I had ever known in the Ghetto, or ever would. Most of the Germans were hungover from nightly festivities to which I was thankfully not invited. They spent the mornings cloistered behind newspapers, emitting a variety of toxic gasses. Lunches were an extended boozy affair, cold cuts, cheese and beer served from crates in the courtyard. Kunde’s collection of seasonal records was on heavy rotation but the man himself rarely deigned to put in an appearance. Symche Spira’s team of informants had also taken the week off, or else had no fresh leads to report. Outside the station, the Jews and Poles were behaving themselves. There was no crime to speak of, no smuggling or attempted escapes. I’m ashamed to say I was bored. It got to the point where I actually looked forward to a coughing fit as a source of entertainment and exercise.

  When our telephone rang that wet Wednesday afternoon, Augustus Brühl and I locked horns to answer it. He got to the receiver first and I went back to the cartoon of Hitler I was perpetrating against Wehrmach-issued stationary, a doodle masquerading as sabotage, or the other way round. I was vaguely aware from the way Brühl loaded his typewriter that the caller wished to give a statement, but I was more interested in perfecting the Führer’s savage slash of hair. It was only when Brühl checked the spelling of the caller’s name that I stopped scratching in order to listen.

  ‘P-R-Z-O-T-Z-K-Y,’ he repeated between striking the keys.

  ‘Initial, M, for Magda.’

  Clack clack clack.

  ‘Apartment 28, Tragutta 9.’

  Clack clack clack.

  ‘I know the area well,’ he said, somehow keeping his eyes from mine. I admired the restraint. ‘It’s just around the corner.’

  This was the moment in the interview when Mrs. Przotzky named me as the person who’d found the postcard. I suspected as much, because it was here that Brühl stopped repeating her words out loud while he typed. I didn’t need to hear the rest of the story to realise I was its main protagonist.

  ‘This is extremely helpful information,’Brühl said, when the statement was finished. ‘You may rest assured we will proceed in the strictest confidence. Good day to you.’

  He replaced the receiver, removed the form from his typewriter, stamped it with a seal from his ink tray and waved the paper, blowing it gently. When it was dry, he got up from his desk, walked round to mine and set the report down on the pile of paper under which I’d buried my cartoon. I glanced at the subject line and saw my address.

  ‘Ah, yes,’ I said. ‘The postcard woman.

  Brühl deflated. ‘You mean you know about it?’

  ‘Of course.’

  I scanned through the first part detailing our encounter at the window sill.

  ‘So it’s all on the level?’

  ‘Seems to be.’

  It was the second half of the statement that caught me by surprise:

  Hauptsturmfürhrer Mohnke asked if I knew anybody with a motive or a grievance. I didn’t at the time. But I was talking to the janitor over Christmas, and he happened to mention a couple who live on the top floor. Their son was a Volkliste, fighting in Russia. He was killed during the summer in the Battle of Rostov. His mother and father took the news very badly, and have since had a few arguments with other tenants. Apparently the parents threw a party last month when General von Schobert crashed his aircraft in a Russian minefield last month. The General was their son’s commander.

  ‘Von Schobert’s death,’ I said. ‘She never mentioned that to me.’

  ‘Claims she only found out recently.’

  I nodded. ‘Seems pretty cut-and-dry to me, in terms of means and motive. What’s the problem? Better late than never.’

  ‘Jesus, Harry. Have you no idea how serious this is?’

  I counted off the offences on my fingers. ‘Subversion of the war effort, undermining military morale, sedition and defeatism. Is that about right? Oh, and punishable by the guillotine.’

  ‘It’s your own apartment block.’

  ‘I can hardly be held be responsible for that. I only moved in last month.’

  ‘Why didn’t you say anything?’

  ‘It’s outside the walls, not a District matter. We’ve got enough on our plates, I didn’t want to bother you.’

  ‘I’m not talking about me,’ Brühl said. ‘Why would you sit on something like this?’

  I shifted in my seat. Sit on it?’

  ‘There’s no report, man. No investigation. Przotzky’s had to follow the damn thing up herself.’

  ‘No investigation?’

  ‘This was almost a week ago. The Gestapo don’t bloody stop for Christmas! What on earth were you thinking of?’

  I hunched forward, pressed my fingertips to the corners of my eyes and raked them down the sides of my nose to my lips. I sniffed disconsolately and said, ‘I must be losing my mind.’

  ‘Oh, Harry. Those damn pills.’

  ‘I filed a report. I know I did.’

  Brühl pulled up a chair and sat down at my side, knees pressing into my thighs.

  ‘Alright, look. This is how we play it. You’ve only just moved here. You’ve had a devastating loss. Your brother’s a war hero - ’

  ‘I am losing my mind!’

  ‘Steady. We’re going for the sympathy vote, not the loony bin.’

  I grabbed the handle underneath my desk, yanked the drawer out and rifled through the stack of paper until I found the Photostat I was looking for.

  ‘I knew it.’

  I handed the flimsy copy to Brühl.

  ‘What’s this?’

  ‘My report. I wrote it up immediately after I found the postcard, December 23rd.’

  Brühl gazed from the sheet to me and back again. ‘So the Gestapo did already know?’

  ‘I sent it over to Pomorska Street that afternoon. I remember putting it in the mail-bag, along with the card.’

  This was partly true. I had filled out a report about finding the postcard when I arrived at Jozefinska, and I did make a Photostat, but the original never found its way to HQ. I burnt it that night in my fireplace. The card, however, didn’t come with me to the station in the first place. After Mrs. Pryzotsky left, I ran back upstairs and locked it in the safe, behind the Caravaggio.

  ***

  Hans Frank threw an enormous party at the castle that New Year’s Eve to raise money for the Winter Aid, the Nazi charity charged with helping impoverished Germans stocked with fuel. The bash promised gallivanting of a more refined nature than Kunde’s Solstice rituals: waltzing to the likes of the Blue Danube and the Fleder
maus overture.

  I didn’t know the first step of a waltz, which was a problem, since dance lessons were a mandatory element of the Jünkerschule training that Harry Mohnke had undertaken. Fortunately, I saw an easy way out, and for once it required little in the way of subterfuge. In the days leading up to the 31st, I made a very public display of my coughing fits, ensuring each one was louder and a more-sustained production than the last. At one point, I got so carrried away that telephone conversations in the vicinity had to be suspended until my attack ceased. When I announced my withdrawal from the party that morning, it was met with a general sense of relief. Even August Brühl didn’t seek to change my mind.

  Several months later, in the rural idyll of Kopaliny, I was to learn of a momentous New Year’s Eve gathering that took place a thousand kilometres away in Lithuania, hosted by a brave poet I had once met and scorned, Abba Kovner, gaunt and heavy-lidded at the tender age of twenty-three.

  Life had not improved for the Jews of Wilno since my departure. Word from survivors of the Ponary massacres had begun to slip through the gaps in the Ghetto walls, but, much like Syzmek Lustgarten, the prisoners of Wilno were still not ready to believe the truth. Only a handful listened. But this handful decided to act. Amongst these committed crusaders, December was a month of intense debate. The most pressing dilemna was whether to remain in Wilno or attempt to join comrades in the larger Ghettos of Bialystock or Warsaw, or flee into the forests. Abba Kovner argued to stay. Fighting was his passion, and he dreamed of uniting the Ghetto to join him. To this end, he sought to organise a mass meeting with all the various youth organisations in attendance. A date was chosen, December 31st, a day of so many social gatherings that one more might go unnoticed by the ever-vigilant Nazis. So it came to pass.

  That evening, a hundred and fifty young men and women came together in a public soup kitchen on Strazuna Street. Abba Kovner called the meeting to order and read the speech he had been working on for many days and nights, a call to arms that remains amongst the finest achievements of his verse:

  Let us not go like sheep to the slaughter, Jewish youth!

  Do not trust those who are trying to deceive you. Out of 80,000 Jews of the Jerusalem of Lithuania, only 20,000 remain. In front of your eyes our parents, our brothers and our sisters are being torn away from us. Where are the hundreds of men who were snatched away for labour by the Lithuanian kidnappers? Where are those naked women who were taken away on the horror-night of the provocation? Where are those Jews of the Day of Atonement? And where are our brothers of the second Ghetto? Anyone who is taken out through the gates of the Ghetto, will never return. All roads of the Ghetto lead to Ponary, and Ponary means death.

  They have all been shot there. Hitler plans to destroy all the Jews of Europe, and the Jews of Lithuania have been chosen as the first in line.

  We will not be led like sheep to the slaughter!

  True, we are weak and defenceless, but the only reply to the murderer is revolt!

  Brothers! Better to fall as free fighters than to live by the mercy of the murderers.

  Arise! Arise with your last breath!

  Kovner finished to thundering silence.

  But the words had lit a fire. Seconds later, the group broke out in spirited song. In Wilno at least, the revolution had begun.

  31

  ‘Gentlemen, it’s starting.’

  With those words, Wilhelm Kunde proclaimed the commencement of the programme that would bring about the anihilation of the Polish Jewry. Of course, there was no mention of genocide in his address. To hear Kunde speak, it was all a matter of streamlining the administration: effective immediately, twenty-nine villages in the vicinity of the city were to be amalgamated into a region known as ‘Greater Cracow’. The villages had been selected because they contained high numbers of Jews who’d found shelter during the previous year’s expulsions. Henceforth, all Jews residing in ‘Greater Cracow’ were required to relocate into our Residential District on the morning of January 23rd.

  While Kunde droned on, I recalled the villagers of Zogory, who’d received a similar edict abut the Gorlice Ghetto, only to be taken out into the fields, ordered to undress and lay face down in a muddy mass grave. The Jews of Jajsi who were told they’d be moving into the Braslaw Ghetto, the Jews of Slobodka to Braslaw and the Opsa Jews to Vidz. The last stage of resettlement was death.

  It was January 3rd 1942.

  Had my family scrambled towards the Ukranian border with the other residents of Paskow, they might be safe. But if Shoshanadecided to try and join up with the residents of a larger Ghetto, as suggested in Vilno, she would be heading into the firing line.

  Kopaliny was spared from the original twenty-nine villages. If Akiva were organising resistance from the farm, I needed to warn them. Even if the Draengers were only learning how to plough for the Holy Land, they deserved to know the truth. The weight of evidence was now overwhelming. Ponary, Brühl’s warning about the coming fireworks, the old man of Paskow, and the so-called ‘expansion’ of Greater Cracow.

  If the Jews think 41 has been funny, wait till they catch wind of 42.’

  I wrote to Gusta and Shimshon that evening, laying everything bare, and offering my help. For return correspondace, I used an alias and an apartment number on the non-existant sixth floor of the Tragutta block. Immediately after posting the letter, I sought out janitor Escherich and explained that Pomorska HQ was running a covert military-intelligence operation in his building. Any mail that arrived for a ‘Mordka Zygot’ should immediately be given over. I knew Escherich would cooperate. He was still shaken from the postcard incident.

  An Inspector Schmidt of the Gestapo had last week taken away Mr. and Mrs. Nowak, the grieving parents from the top floor, on suspicion of undermining military morale. Although Magda Przyotsky was directly responsible for their arrest, it was I who had failed to save them. It was a very long night following their disappearance.

  Nobody in the building, least of all myself, was prepared for what happened next.

  Three days later, Mr. and Mrs. Nowak returned home, pale and diminished, but otherwise unscathed. Extensive interrogation and handwriting tests had cleared them both of involvement.

  The postcard writer was still at large.

  ***

  Augustus Brühl and I were reassigned from the Department of Civil Affairs in order to help oversee the new resettlement policy. I saw this as demotion and was worried we had fallen out of favour. To have a seditious propagandist living in my apartment block was hardly a ringing endorsement, although I was never under suspicion. The Gestapo accepted I had filed my report, and sanctioned a delivery boy as a result. Brühl’s fall from grace was more troubling. He had committed no faux pas, but since the start of the new year, the rift had widened between him and the rest of the station. Clusters of men always seemed to be mocking him for some indiscretion, but fell silent when I approached, or their conversations changed tact with a beguiling ease. Perhaps it was all in my mind. Our new job was only a temporary one, Wilhelm Kunde explained with a dry chuckle. We would be soon back to doing what we did best, flushing out Symche Spira’s gold-bricking rats.

  The first task was to visit the twenty-nine villages to announce the imminent changes in status. We travelled together in Brühl’s DKW rather than splitting the load, in case of hostile reactions. Amazingly, there were none. A few grumbles was the worst of it. There’d been a new measure or directive against the Jews every week for two years now, and they had survived. Why should this one be any different? If Augustus Brühl hadn’t been at my side, I could have given them a few reasons.

  Twenty-nine times I steeled my heart against the villagers’ weary acceptance, and the prospect of finding my own family crowding the market square. If Shoshana saw me goose-stepping out, she would have understood. If my mother saw me in Nazi uniform, she was likely to drop dead of shock.

  Twenty-nine times I prepared for the worst, and twenty-nine times I survived.

  But wh
at next? Were Brühl and I set to be mere messengers? Or would we be sent for the 23rd to oversee the digging of the pits, and the final relocation? We were ‘friendly faces’, best placed to provide a reassuring continuity when the villagers began to suspect they were never going to see the Ghetto.

  32

  In the end, all were spared, and none were.

  Brühl and I had orders to remain at Jozefinska on the 23rd, ‘resettlement day’. I prayed all night for the souls of the soon-to-be departed, and again before I left the apartment.

  I wasn’t expecting any immediate panic within the Ghetto. News of the massacres would take days to seep through the walls. If Syzmek Lustgarden’s response was anything to go by, people would largely be deaf to the chatter. Who could blame them. It profits the Death Row inmate little to learn of his neighbour’s execution.

  So sunk in disconsolation was I that morning, crossing the groundfloor lobby, I almost failed to notice the postcard pinned to the centre of Otto Escherich’s noticeboard, petalled by his usual array of housekeeping reminders.

  The Führer has no wife,

  The butcher has no sow,

  The baker has no dough!

  That is the Third Reich. Hitler's might before right will bring us no peace!

  Down with Hitler's crew.

  I read it twice, then hurried towards the front door. This time, nobody saw me.

  Another card, on this day of days.

  As I stepped out onto the street, I thought back to when I found the first card, the day before Christmas Eve.

  Good God - that had been December 23rd.

  Here we were again, a month later, to the day. What on earth did it mean?

  I turned left on Tragutta and walked north, into rising river mist. At the end of the street, a low-sided army truck passed slowly on intersecting Kacik, its cargo obscured behind taut canvas and poles. An officer I didn’t recognize was hunched in the cabin at the steering wheel, cranking his neck. I watched the truck trundle by. At its rear, great folds of the green cover had been lifted up, and a herd of dark bearded faces in caps and scarves stared out, gripping the poles like prison bars. Jews.