I Am Juden

by Stephen Uzzell

  The Nordland had burnt halfway down when the curtain lifted and Amon Goethe pressed his face to the glass, hands clutching his cheeks in a parody of The Scream.

  ‘Room for two out there?’

  ‘I’m almost finished.’

  ‘Stay a while.’

  He lurched up to the railing, banged his knee and cursed. I shouldn’t have been surprised how drunk he was. Thanks to me keeping his glass full, Goethe had emptied the best part of two bottles of champagne down his throat.

  ‘Smoking alone is such a crime,’ he said. ‘Everything tastes better with company, even tobacco.’

  But the cigarette soon made him glassy eyed and wistful and he appeared to lose himself in the clouds. It would only have taken one shove to send him toppling over the barrier. The street below was empty except for a dog trotting along the opposite pavement. It crossed the road and passed under the building, disappearing from view.

  ‘Why do I get the feeling there’s something you’re not telling me?’ he said. ‘Professor.’

  ‘Guilty as charged.’

  ‘So share the joke.’

  ‘For as long as I can remember, I’ve been the black sheep of the family. My father didn’t approve of academics.’

  ‘Your own father didn’t know your profession?’

  ‘It seemed easier that way. He thought I was in Kiel for the naval base. I actually did end up there, after Junkeschule. Then Erich died last year and somebody at the funeral let slip we’d met at Graduation. Father’s hardly spoken to me since.’

  ‘I fell out with my old man when I joined the Austrian Nazi Party,’ Goethe said. ‘He’d have been delighted with the likes of you.’

  ‘Pity we can’t swap. So what’s all this I hear about Belzec?’ I said. ‘Some kind of renovation?’

  Goethe opened his mouth like a fish. A fleet of smoke rings sailed into the night.

  ‘I get it,’ I said. ‘No shop talk at the weekend. Ignore me.’

  ‘Have you ever been?’

  ‘To Belzec?’

  ‘It’s unrecognizable, I tell you.’

  ‘From what?’

  ‘It looks like a standard transit camp from the outside. Zone 2’s screened off by fir branches over a barbed wire fence. The Jews get unloaded in Zone one. When a train arrives, the Sonderkommandos tells the passengers to get ready for communal showers.’

  ‘They must stink to high heaven by this point.’

  ‘They strip off and run naked along the Tube and before they know it, they’re locked in Zone 2, in the chambers. Used to be a home-made job botched together in the barracks, a few planks plugged with sand and rubber. Lots of leaks, usually only one room working at a time. Long queues build-up, people get ansty. Totally unfit for purpose, the whole thing.’

  ‘Leaky showerheads? Sounds like they’ve got it better than us. Have you ever tried flushing the loo at Jozefinska?’

  ‘You ought to see the new block, Harry, The bunker. It’ll be the envy of the industrialised world. Brick and mortar, the size of a football pitch, six chambers, insulated with cement walls. They’ll be gassing 1,000 every thirty minutes when it’s up and running. And all of it expressly designed to empty our little Ghetto. Quite humbling, when you think about it.’

  There’d been rumours of mass executions at the camps before, but since nobody had ever escaped to tell their story, nothing could be proven. We’d seen how the Germans cleared the streets that summer; we were under no illusions. Hundreds shot before the trains were even loaded. What kind of greeting did we think was waiting, behind closed gates.

  But this?

  Mechanized gas chambers killing 12,000 a day?

  Even now, two hours after the conversation, as my hand shakes across the page of my ledger, I cannot believe what I heard.

  46

  An insecticide manufactured by I.G. Farben and known commercially as Zyklon B was first used to kill 600 Soviet prisoners of war in a makeshift gas chamber in the Auschwitz cellars on September 3rd, 1941. In Poland that summer, five killing centres stood equipped for the most efficient mass murder the world had ever known: Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka and Auschwitz-Birkenau. Ten months after the first gassing, Reichsführer Himmler spent the weekend in the Silesian countryside, inspecting the camp’s ongoing expansion and construction of four large chambers and crematoria. The piece de resistance was Himmler’s observation of a successful Sonderaktion from beginning to end. Two convoys of Jews arrived from Holland, were detrained, then gassed in bunker 2, and their bodies removed to be buried in mass graves. The whole process ran without hitch. The very next day, Reichsführer Himmler ordered all Ghettos in the Generalgouvernement to be eliminated by December 31st 1942. Jozefinska received the memo on Sunday July 19th.

  The Eagle Pharmacy had not yet opened its doors when I almost broke them down half an hour later. Helena Krywaniuk let me in, her fingers shaking at the latch. Perhaps she thought I’d come to arrest her. Pankiewicz stood ramrod straight at his counter, adjusting weights on his scales and refusing to look up until he’d found the balance.

  ‘I need to see you,’ I said. ‘In private.’

  ‘What’s the matter?’ he said when we were inside his office. ‘You look awful.’

  I told him everything I’d learned, and steeled myself for his inevitable disbelief.

  He cast those deep eyes to the floor and fiddled with his bow-tie.

  ‘We know.’

  ‘What do you mean, you know?’

  It turns out somebody had escaped after all. A dentist called Jiri Bachner had been amongst the first deportees from Cracow last month. When his transport reached Belzec, Bachner broke loose from the others and hid in a latrine. He spent two days submerged up to his chin in the excrement pit and broke out of the camp on the third night, stealing past the stack of corpses outside the bunker. A fortnight later, trudging along the train tracks, he made his way back to the Ghetto.

  ‘He came back?’ I said. ‘Why?’

  ‘The same reason you’re here.’

  ‘And that was, what, a whole month ago?’

  ‘The Judenrat didn’t want to start a panic, based on one person’s story. Bachner’s hair had turned completely white and at times he was incoherent. He looked like a madman.’

  ‘So they ignored him?’

  ‘Initially, yes. But Akiva sent a kashariyot to follow the trail of the deportees. They made contact on the Aryan side with a Polish railroad worker familiar with the transport routes. They went together and confirmed what Bachner saw.’

  ‘So now what?’

  ‘The decision’s already been made to close the farm at Kopaliny. Gusta and Marek Davison will be leading a return to the Ghetto, to direct operations from here. We have a friendly guard who will open up the gate for them, a good Catholic man, a police sergeant from Vienna. Like you, he left his regiment in the Ukraine to get posted here, to help. He brings food and takes children out, for no bribe. We need you to meet the Davisons in Kazimierz and escort them to Zgody Square. If anybody stops you, they are prisoners, under your custody.’

  Deportations from Belgium to Auschwitz began on July 22nd.

  On the 23rd, Treblinka received its first consignment of Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto into its ten gas chambers, each holding 200 persons. Until Zyklon B could be supplied, Treblinka relied on carbon monoxide pumped in from vehicles outside the chamber. As in pre-crematoria Auschwitz-Birkenau, bodies were disposed of in pits.

  So it continued, day by day.

  The Davisons chose Saturday 25th July to re-enter the Ghetto. Black Sabbath, the saddest Shabbat of the year, when Jews commemorate the destruction of their Holy Land and Temple by the Romans. History was repeating itself, but today the enemy wore steel helmets with lightning bolts not feather-plumed galeas.

  At 9.00 o’clock that evening, I approached the designated bench in Kazimierz, a few blocks from my mother’s old shop in the heart of what used to be Jewish Cracow. I had last come this way in December, when Kunde dis
patched me to bring in Marek Ringelblum from Szeroka Street.

  The Davisons were sitting next to each other in front of the desecrated tombstones of the Remuh Cemetery. It was a popular spot for young Aryans to be photographed with the ruined synagogue as backdrop. Gusta and Marek looked much like any other couple – his eyebrows a little bushier than the young Poles, perhaps – but what marked them out to me, as promised, were their immaculate overcoats. Given the heat, even at this time of night, most strollers only wore shirts or blouses.

  Lingering in the shadows, I watched the Davisons’ false bonhomie as behind them a couple posed cheek-to-cheek by the torn graveyard wall, the way Gusta threw her head back and laughed along with everybody else when the lovers poked their tongues as the flashbulb popped. On seeing my approach in full SS regalia, the group squealed and called for me to join the portait. I declined, walking briskly along the the pavement towards the bench.

  Marek told me not to stop with a terse shake of his head. Had the plan changed? I kept on walking to the corner of Ciemma Street and paused to cross the busy road. The Davisons caught up as we waited for a break in the traffic, but stood apart from me, on either side of the lamppost.

  Wordlessly, at half a block’s remove, they followed me through narrow streets onto the broad Starowilsna Bridge and into Podgorze Island, and from there along the banks of the Vistula to the north-eastern side of the Ghetto. I passed in front of the last tram collecting Aryans at Kacik Street, and when it rumbled away, I thought I had lost them.

  Instead, they had metamorphosised. Walking towards me across the tracks were two disheveled Jews with tangled hair, overcoats discarded to reveal Ghetto rags underneath. Marek even had his own hand-cuffs. He fastened his wrist to his wife’s and and passed me the key, but drew his hand away before I could take it.

  ‘I don‘t have a spare,’ he said.

  ‘I’d better not lose it, then.’

  ‘You brought your own gun, at least?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Just try not to shoot me in the back.’

  Gusta gave him an admonishing tug of his wrist

  ‘It’s alright,’ I said. ‘I’ve actually never fired a gun before, so it’s good advice.’

  ‘This is your Sacred Flame? God help us all.’

  ‘Marek!’

  New ID for you,’ I said. ‘With added Blauschein.’

  Marek inspected the cards.

  ‘What’s Deutsche Emalia?’

  ‘Metalworks factory. Oskar Schindler’s agreed to put you on his books.’

  ‘It’s perfect,’ Gusta said, putting her card in her purse. ‘Excuse my husband. We’re just anxious to get inside.’

  I pointed my pistol in the direction of the Zgody Square gate and followed an arm’s length behind. There were three guards on duty and our friendly Vienese police sergeant could have been any of them. His name had not been revealed to me, and vice versa. I still don’t know if the Davidsons showed their cards to the right guard. But ee were nodded through without a single question being asked.

  Halfway across the Sqare, Gusta brought us to an abrupt halt and dropped to her knees. I thought she was overcome with emotion, and I was right, in a sense. Pulling Marek down with her, Gusta lowered her face and kissed the blood-stained concrete.

  ‘We’re home,’ she said.

  I let Gusta knock on the door of thirteen Jozefinska, and watched from the corridor as Syzmek Lustgarten came out grinning, embracing Gusta first, then Marek. From the apartment came the sound of an acoustic guitar and singing, and for the sweetest of moments I was transported back to the easy camaraderie of Pilies Street, of nights spent with Moishe and Baruch and the others, Herman Glik and Shoshana. Those days were gone forever.

  As I turned to leave, Lustgarten pushed past Marek and grabbed my wrist, then threw his arms around my shoulders and kissed my ear.

  ‘Come in, come in,’ he said. ‘Nights like this are few and far between.’

  After my last reception, I wasn’t expecting this.

  ‘There somewhere else you’d rather be?’ Lustgarten said. ‘An oompah band maybe?’

  ‘My orders were to see the Davisons safely delivered…’

  ‘How do you know they’re safe? I might have a bunch of cannibals in there, tearing them limb from limb.’ He squeezed my biceps and licked his lips. ‘A fine bit of German fleisch on the bones yourself, Mein Herr.’

  The humour was intoxicating. I couldn’t remember the last time a genuine laugh had troubled my throat.

  I followed him in past the kitchen, scene of December’s terse exchange, and on into the the living room, packed to the rafters with two dozen souls, not a cannibal amongst them. I was the golem risen from the silt of the Vistula, my murky green collar studded with arcane runes. Nobody dove shrieking out the window into the well-shaft when they saw me, although the guitarist in the corner did fumble a chord when he looked up.

  A small pale man with coal black hair rose from an armchair and donned glassses to make sure he wasn’t hallucinating, then came towards me with his hand raised.

  ‘Dolek Liebskind,’ he said as we shook. ‘We owe you a huge debt. I don’t know how you manage it, day in, day out.’

  ‘I’m not the one in fear of being deported.’

  ‘Not yet,’ Marek said, eyeing me from the opposite chair. He flinched as Gusta swooped towards him, bumped her hip into his elbow and snuggled up to his shoulder on the arm-rest.

  The three chairs constituted the Akiva elders, but the term was a relative one. At thirty, Dolek Liebskind was their senior by five years. I was old enough to be the father of many in the room, and the grandfather of some. The only person who made me feel young was the craggy-faced guitarist in the corner. Regardless of age or gender, there was no hierarchy amongst the leaders. Command dove-tailed ceaselessly from one to the other. All decisions were taken collectively, after consultation and conferment. I have tried to record faithfully who said what, but any mistakes in attribution are my own. At times it was like watching a four-headed hydra.

  I recognized bu Liebskind’s name from the original Kopaliny letter sent to Chief Muller by the Jewish Self-Help Society, of which Liebskind was supervisor. Marek had been his close friends for years; they called each other brother. Dolek had spent the spring at Kopaliny, but had been living in the Ghetto since June. How porous those precious German walls were, how wide the gaps between the cement! Dolek Libeskind himself, the thorn in Wilhelm Kunde’s side, living in the Ghetto for two months, and even I didn’t know. The third chair was taken by Romek Liebowicz, a sleepy-eyed socialist with a broad face shiny as a wax-work.

  Around these four, kneeling and cross-legged, their disciples gathered. When Syzmek Lustgarten called them ‘kids’, he wasn’t exaggerating. Most were barely out of their teens. I recognized some as the sons and daughters of deportees, knocked from their parents’ arms in Zgody Square by the batons of the Jewish Police. Their belongings were piled up against the walls in bags and boxes, everything the children could carry. They’d lost families and homes this summer, before Lustgarten provided a refuge. I took my place amongst them, by Gusta’s chair. She was talking to a group of kasharyots, trading tales of close shaves and lucky escapes. It turned out the Davisons had been dodging police all afternoon. When two officers boarded an Aryan-only bus outside the city, Gusta had the window open and was ready to jump. But it turned out the only crime the cops were interested in was a broken rear headlamp.

  The loud laughter of the kashariyots almost masked their fear. A young nurse called Halina Rubinek who’d served as a courier in Warsaw told how she’d avoided certain death on Zelazna Street when stopped by a patrol to have her bag checked. She threw the sack open with a flourish and began juggling potatoes. A gendarme even joined in on the act and grabbed a handful of spuds, his fingers stopping just short of the bullets buried beneath.

  Adina Meed had slept with a gentile watchman in order to gain access to his factory window. Afterwards, they smuggled out a
carton of dynamite, having to quickly break it down into smaller packs to pass it through the grille. The big, burly watchman shook like a blade of grass in a gale as he worked. When finished, he mopped the sweat form his brow and thanked Adina for curing him. She asked what he meant by cured. ‘I’m sworn off pussy for life’.

  After a few more minutes, Dolek Liebeskind called the meeting to order. He produced a tattered copy of Oyf Der Vakh, the underground Yiddish newspaper from the Warsaw Ghetto, and read a report of a killing centre based on eyewitness testimony. Jan Karski had been dispatched in search of the deportees and reached the village of Sokolow Podlaski near Treblinka, where he learned about the new side track that ran right up to the gas chambers. Later he met with Uziel Wallach, another escapee, like Jiri Bachner, who confirmed what was happening behind the barbed wire.

  Some of the younger activists in the room had not heard the details before. Syzmek Lustgarten had sheltered them from it. Others were in denial. Tonight, they learned the truth in the starkest of terms

  ‘Thank-you, brother,’ Marek Davison said. ‘No mistake about it: the Jews of Poland are doomed. Tens of thousands are going to die in this German crusade. Very few will escape. They are being led like sheep to slaughter, without raising a hand to defend themselves. And the world is silent. We have been silent, Gusta and I, preparing the fields of Kopaliny for a harvest that will never come. But we will be silent no more. History summons us all to embark on a new road, and I ask that you take it with us.’

  A young man jumped up with clenched fist held high. ‘We’ll tear those Nazi bastards to pieces!’

  ‘Let’s start with the Jewish pigs who wear their uniforms,’ another shouted. ‘They’re the worst of all. Breaking up families and pushing them onto trains while the Germans stand around watching.’

  As I lowered my head in shame, I realised he was talking about Symche Spira and his men.

  ‘Another unpalatable truth.’ Romek Liebowicz shifted his enormous frame and crossed his arms high on his chest. ‘How can we resist the true enemy with this Fifth Column in our midst? It’s not just the Jewish Police. There’s a whole system of collaborators and informers in place to undermine our every move. Our first actions must be directed against these traitors.’