I approached the driver’s window to get a better look at the man. Grey stubble, scar over his left eyebrow, black cap pulled tight over sparse curls.
The driver revved his accelerator and said in Polish, ‘Name?’
‘Which one?’
‘The one that matches what gave me or I’m out of here.’
‘Jozef Siegler.’
The driver nodded. It was good. ‘You got a cigarette, Jozef Siegler?’
‘Here.’ I handed over the pristine packet. ‘Keep them.’
The driver grunted his appreciation and struck one up with a silver lighter that was almost certainly stolen and blew the smoke out the window into my face. ‘Want one?’
I coughed.
‘Suit yourself,’ he said. ‘Let’s go.’
I walked round between the headlights and had my hands on the passenger door handle when the driver said, ‘The fuck are you doing? In the back. Under the tarpaulin. You need to piss, knock. Maybe I hear you, maybe I don’t.’
For four hours we rode, every bump in the road jarring my bones. The tarp and floor were sticky with a dark substance that I hoped was oil, but whatever it was, I was on my way, alone and outside. Almost free. I turned up a corner of the tarp and gazed at the jagged shadows of pine forests and mountain peaks that glided past like icebergs, at the burning stars and the cold, cold moon.
We stopped a little way into Eastern Czechoslovakia just after 04.00. I climbed off the back outside an empty bus-stop and approached the truck window. The name of the small town - Čirč - was all the driver muttered before putting his vehicle back into first gear, executing a wide turn in the road, and trundling back the way he’d come. I watched the truck’s tail-lights disappear into the morning dark. For all his grumpiness, the driver had made good time.
The football stadium was easy to locate; its rickety stands loomed over the northern quarter of town like a hair-raising rollercoaster. And there, beneath the litter-strewn wooden slats next to the main turnstiles, painted in the home team’s red and white stripes, was the entrance to the cellar bar, the Čirč Pivnice. The door was open. Even at this hour, rude laughter bubbled up and out. I tucked the shirt into his baggy trousers, spit-flattened down a tuft of hair and squeezed down the narrow stairway.
Had the sworn enemies of Čirč FC wished to construct a tinder-box under the stadium, they couldn’t have done a better job. The cellar’s interior walls were lined with bamboo, the tables were oak, the chairs wicker, and the only source of light were a dozen sputtering candles. Bestowed into the careless custody of a gang of town drunks, it was a miracle the whole shebang hadn’t gone up in flames.
I lingered at the bottom of the stairs, but was spotted by the tall purple inn-keeper as he made his rounds collecting empty tankards. The man’s face was really quite an extraordinary colour, offset by silky white wisps of thinning hair.
On making eye-contact, the inn-keeper slammed a fistful of handles back down onto the corner table, hiked his trousers up by the belt and waded towards me, grinning. His enormous hands rose and fell in front of his white shirt as if juggling in slow motion. The curve of his lips threatened to crack his jaw in two. I shuffled back, bumping into the bottom step. The purple inn-keeper yucked a laugh, extended those large hands and smothered my shoulders in the warmest of embraces.
‘Vel-com, vel-com!’ he boomed in broken English.
The patrons flashed watery eyes in our direction, but resumed quickly enough their patter, as if such intrusions were commonplace.
‘I’m Jozef Siegler.’
‘No kidd-ing,’ the inn-keeper said. He laid his right hand over his heart. ‘I, Petr.’
‘Petr Zeman?’
Nodding, the inn-keeper smiled again and backed away, sensing the imposition of his own hulking frame. ‘Come, come here. Beer. Good very beer.’
I followed over to the counter and sat on the stool Zeman pulled out before opening the hatch and pouring a tankard of Pilsner, wiping the foam off with a flat wooden stick. ‘Cheers,’ he said.
‘Na zdravie,’ I responded. We switched to Czech, which Petr preferred.
‘Good?’ He asked as I drank. He poured himself a smaller glass and answered his own question. ‘Good.’
Half the tankard gone and I was already light-headed. ‘Are you just open or just closing?’ I asked.
‘Closing? What is the meaning of the word?’ Petr placed a bowl of peanuts on the counter and I scooped a handful, ravenous. ‘If this war’s good for one thing, it’s business. I haven’t had a holiday in years.’ Several seconds passed in which I became aware of the bar’s ambient hum. Petr lowered his voice to a good-natured growl. ‘Is it true they’ve got you into a camp?’
I nodded, drained the remainder of his beer. ‘Aushwitz-Birkenau.’
Petr’s cheeks puffed. That was something, I thought. The name meant something to the outside world.
The remaining conversation was limited to details of my onward journey. The brewery man would be arriving shortly and in a change of plan would take me as far south as Hatvan, an hour from the Hungarian border. I queried this repeatedly, having been advised to accept no alterations to the route previously agreed. But Petr was adamant, and I had no choice but to trust him. Arrangements from Hatvan were already in place, he assured. All subsequent connections would be met. The only difference was, I now would be arriving in Turkey a half day earlier than originally anticipated. With any luck, I’d make up more time with the Brits going south. Win-win: everything to be gained and nothing to lose.
But I remained sceptical, and was not particularly reassured by the sight of the brewery man stepping down from his lorry onto the kerb: a bearish brute taller than Petr (what were these Slovaks eating?) and three times as wide. The kindly barman read the doubt flickering across my eyes.
‘He’s a decent enough guy.’ Petr pumped his hand good bye. ‘He just doesn’t talk that much.’
‘That much’ turned out to be ‘at all.’ I was initially relieved to discover I was allowed to ride up front in the cabin and not hidden on the flat-bed. But before long I found the driver’s stony-faced silence more of an ordeal than being stuffed into any hoppy barrel. I couldn’t even get the man to utter his name, not so much as a grunt.
By the time we crossed the Tatra Mountains, I had abandoned all attempts at engaging the brewery man in conversation and had decided that he was in the presence of what physicians called aphasia voluntaria, or a selective mute. I remembered stumbling onto a lecture at Kiel about children who were able to speak normally, but refused to. Maybe the brewery man had been bullied as a child, then later mailed away to the USA for the Charles Atlas course and trained every muscle in his body apart from his tongue.
The longer the driver maintained his silence, the more my own words seemed take on a mocking air, and so I too stopped talking. The remaining four hour journey was undertaken in complete and utter silence. Clambering out the lorry at a small café on the edges of Hatvan late that afternoon, I didn’t even bother saying goodbye.
All subsequent connections were indeed met, as Petr Zeman had promised. But the brewery man had set the tone for my subsequent reception in southern Europe. I had the distinct impression that rides were being given grudgingly from that point forth. That I was being helped despite my Judaism, not because of it. True enough, I was not at my most sociable. Beyond exhaustion, having already endured twenty-four hours on the road without sleep or sustenance, save for two Pilsners and a bowl of peanuts. And as far as tokens of gratitude for my benefactors, all I’d thought to bring was one packet of cigarettes, which now seemed laughable. Throughout Hungary and Yugoslavia and on into Romania, I was passed from van to school-bus to – on one occasion – horse-drawn hearse.
Dropping down the continent, the local citizens’ skin grew darker and their hair more prone to curls and I swore I could feel the bitter breath of resentment on the nape of my neck.
The last day on European soil passed in a blur of nightmarish vi
sions and rude awakenings, a grim cyclone of anti-sleep. One time, between Sofia and Haskovo, I opened my eyes to find I’d been lifted from vehicle while unconscious. Any manner of physical abuse could have been visited upon me in that condition. And yet it was not. The rides kept coming and the sun grew fiercer and suddenly the church spires that had pierced the landscape slowly gave way to the smooth, breast-like domes of mosques.
I was dropped on the outskirts of a sprawl I correctly identified as Istanbul and waited on the side of a dusty street for two hours, with only a forlorn three-legged dog for company. The mutt wanted nothing from me but affection, which was all I had to give. After I stroked its tufted haunches to a sheen, the dog collapsed onto its belly and fell asleep with its long chin resting on my boot. When the British army jeep tore round the corner with a jolly toot-toot, the dog flung itself up and scrambled away, fur spiked in fright like a Loony Tunes cartoon.
‘Sorry we’re late, Jozef old boy,’ a familiar voice called over the clanking engine. ‘The roads here are worse than bloody Nottingham.’
It couldn’t be. And yet it was. There in the flesh: I was shaking the pale, pencil-thin fingers of Lieutenant James Rogarden. Four years since any kind of contact, and they’d sent me the same bloody man who’d recruited me: you had to hand it to the Brits.
‘Hop in, Dr. Doolittle,’ Rogarden said. ‘The dog stays put, I’m afraid.’
Still dazed by the apparition, I climbed onto the back seat and pushed up into the middle, between Rogarden and the driver. I couldn’t see much of the other man apart from the tip of blistered nose and a badly-scabbed ear, neither of which I recognized. The driver was testament to the old joke that redheads didn’t tan, they burnt. This one could certainly handle a jeep, though, executing a hairpin turn up a cramped alley at a cool forty miles an hour. Laundry lines flapped over our heads like great winged beasts.
Rogarden was thriving, fulfilling his manifest destiny as apprentice master of this brave New World, eyes crystal blue as the Bali Ocean as he turned and grinned. ‘Good to see you again, old chap.’
‘You too, my friend,’ I said, nodding. ‘You too.’
Rogarden’s face had filled out since ’38, the finely pointed moustache he now sported nothing more than a tragic inevitability. Errol Flynn, that was who he looked like. I saw he still travelled with his trusty black ledger, stuffed into the passenger door pocket between a spray of maps. Debrief-on-wheels, it made sense. The information I had about what was happening in Poland couldn’t wait.
‘I’m disappointed your chum’s not here too,’ I said, relishing the smooth feel of the English tongue after the days’ deprivations. ‘I thought you two were inseparable. What was his name, Bellamy?’
‘No,’ Rogarden said, and gazed off at an oil refinery in the distance. ‘Bellamy didn’t make it.’
I knew he was talking about more than the trip. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘And what more is there to say than that? Let’s hope Corporal Fleck’s got more staying power.’
‘It’s an honour to meet you, sir,’ Fleck said. I saw from the squint of the driver’s eyes in the mirror that he was being entirely serious. An honour.
‘I hope you can put aside your first impressions,’ I told him. ‘Bear in mind I’ve been on the road for two days already. One day dragged by a knackered horse in a coffin. I was in the coffin, I should point out, not the horse. But it was close.’
‘Stop complaining, man,’ Rogarden said. ‘You people should have the wandering down to a tee by now, all those centuries of practice.’
‘There’s wandering,’ I said. ‘And there’s hostile abduction.’ Poor choice of words: I tried not to think about the thousands of windowless cattle-wagons criss-crossing the Reich. ‘Anyway, here I am. Safe and sound and in about a million tiny pieces.’
‘Why don’t you sit back and nod off? Twenty hours or so before we get there. Plenty of time.’
‘Later. I’ve always wanted to see Istanbul.’
‘Really? I always enjoy seeing it in the rear-view mirror. Ghastly place. The last time I ate there, it was three days before I could stand up without shitting myself. Bloody fish sandwich, of all things.’
‘You’re British,’ I said. ‘I thought the pursuit of the inedible was your national sport.’
‘World-beaters, you know us.’
I slumped back against the seat and let the city wash over me. The high palace and mosques of Sultan Ahmed gleamed like Faberge eggs as a golden dusk descended over the Horn. My view was confined to snatched glimpses as the jeep patrolled the polluted northern quarters between the bridges until a car ferry agreed to take us over the Bosporus.
We decamped unmolested to a café on the sun-dappled western deck of the good ship Fatih and ate salt-cod sandwiches, Rogarden abstaining, washed down with Turkish tea from hot glass tumblers.
The city’s jewels glittered against the skyline as the ferry pushed into the harbour, the lush green courtyards of the Topkapi unfurling down the hillside like enchanted velvet. I could have studied the complex for the rest of the evening as if preparing for a great heist, but Rogarden had other ideas. The ledger was open, propped between his knee and the lattice table-top. He was busy scribbling away, seemingly as lost in his own thoughts as I had been in mine, but the invitation was unmistakable. Debrief-on-water.
‘You’ve shown me paradise on earth,’ I said. ‘Now I give you the guided tour of hell, is that it?’
‘In your own time.’
‘What do you want to know?’
‘Are you sure you’re ready?’
‘I’ve been ready for two years,’ I said. ‘It’s you I’m worried about.’
Rogarden scratched a fresh heading in his book. ‘Let’s start with Aushwitz. What are the conditions like?’
‘Conditions?’ I rubbed his nose. ‘Conditions would be nice.’
I turned away from those blue eyes, back across the water. The ferry was slowly turning now towards the East, Sultan Ahmed receding from view. Strange the mosques and sacred Muslim relics of the Byzantium era now found themselves stranded on the European side of the city. The nightmare of history: for once James Joyce hadn’t got it quite right. Sometimes you woke up.
I talked uninterrupted for thirty minutes, the condensed tour of the underworld. My first day through the Auschwitz gates, the first trains, the prisoner’s last walks towards the waterless showers, the heaps of tangled bodies pulled out and swallowed up by a greedy earth. The lies of the Ghetto before that, the vile language of liquidation, the ceaseless routines of Special Selections. I couldn’t look Rogarden or Fleck in the eye until I’d finished. Turning towards them, steeling myself for a sceptical British inquisition, there was still no way I could have expected Rogarden’s response.
‘It’s almost verbatim,’ he said. ‘Word for word. Jesus Christ, Fleck. He was telling the truth.’
‘Verbatim to what?’ I said. ‘What are you talking about? Who was telling the truth?’
The two Brits looked at each other; Fleck shrugged.
Turning back several pages in his ledger, Rogarden said, ‘Does the name Jan Karski mean anything to you?’
‘Polish resistance fighter, infiltrated the Warsaw Ghetto.’
‘He posed as a guard at the Izbica transit camp, witnessed Jews being herded on to train cars, saw they never came back. The Polish government in London smuggled Karski out with a microfilm detailing atrocities. He addressed the governments of the United Nations two weeks ago.’
‘In New York?’
‘The mass extermination of Jews in German occupied Poland, that was his talk.’
‘Two weeks ago? So you mean to say… you know? Why the hell are these camps still standing?’
‘The Americans didn’t want to bomb civilians.’
‘Believe me, bombing would be a blessed relief.’
‘And Karski’s only one man,’ Rogarden said. ‘Churchill was worried of the lone Pole with an Occupation axe to grind, exaggerating for
dramatic effect.’
‘Exaggerating? Did you listen to a word I said?’
‘Every one of them, old fruit. Dictated to the best of my ability. Here.’ Rogarden pushed the ledger across the table for me to check. ‘Sign and date underneath for now, I’ll get copies typed up ASAP. This changes everything.’
I pushed it back untouched. ‘This changes nothing. Not if you already knew.’
The ferry docked and we spoke again only briefly on the subject of which deck we had left the jeep on. I debated remaining onboard and heading straight back to the European side. But I was more than halfway to Palestine now, and could almost smell the scent of my mother’s jasmine. A sullen child, I mutely followed Rogarden and Fleck down to the vehicle.
Throughout the rest of Turkey, Syria and down into the dustbowl of Lebanon, I resisted all further impulse to talk, even when the two men up front were discussing my favourite actor’s latest film, a Resistance romance set across the Med in Morocco. I hadn’t seen Bogart on screen since They Drive By Night, when the presentation of American films had become illegal across the Reich and its protectorate, and I was eager for gossip. But I wasn’t about to break his silence for anybody, not even Bogie. I had said all I had to say about his life in Poland. The truth was in Rogarden’s ledger now. What happened next was up to him.
We arrived in Nablus at night, not that I knew which night it was exactly, or that I was even in Nablus. In blackness, all deserts looked the same. From what I’d seen, they didn’t look much different by daylight, either. But for the first time since leaving Istanbul, Fleck had taken his foot off the accelerator.
The two Brits were peering at a row of squat one floor houses that had sprung up out of nowhere in the middle of the darkness. They drove slowly past each one, conferring briefly until one of them said ‘no’, and moved on. The British army knew where the house was; the prodigal son did not. It was as if I was being led to my mother’s house blindfolded.
And then, at the last but one in the row, they came across a sign. Hanukah candles burning in the front window, the only light in the street.
I Am Juden Page 49