by R.J. Ellory
The proclamation of independence for Poland in 1918, the Treaty of Versailles which redrew Poland’s borders and led to the war with Russia in 1920, brought the nineteen-year-old Kolzac back to the real world. The same year saw Poland advancing as far as Wilno, the capital of Lithuania, and then onwards far into the Ukraine. Armed Russian soldiers rolled their heaving tonnage of cannons and horses across the barren landscape of this country, sweeping through and killing these people, these wild-eyed gypsies, until the Treaty of Riga gave Poland a new frontier a hundred miles further east.
The old man, teacher, his apprentice ever following him, fled again to the Carpathians. They left behind them a land ravaged and desolate with war, its people starving, its aristocrats clinging desperately to their estates and refusing to share or divide their concerns. Foreigners came – Ukrainians, Ruthenians, Germans – and in 1926 Marshal Pilsudski – a man who had refused to contest the presidential election in 1922, a man who had led Polish forces to victory in the 1920–1921 Polish-Soviet war – took his army, overthrew the government, and declared a dictatorship.
Jozef Kolzac and his master stayed in the south, the heart of the Carpathians, for close to ten years. The old man died, was mourned, a pyre built, his body burned, and his ashes scattered across virgin snow by the young man who had followed him. And then that same young man returned to civilization as the dictator Pilsudski was succeeded by a military junta following his death. Kolzac journeyed west, out along the Czechoslovakian border, north again to Krakow, and finally to Lodz in central Poland.
Kolzac was there in 1936, and here the pattern of his life changed. Here he played for people who had never seen such a man, who had never heard such music, who stood and stared as the tousle-haired, wild-eyed gypsy cavorted and danced and struck such chords upon this instrument. They fed him, they threw him coins, these people who believed that Chopin and Paderewski were the true geniuses of their homeland, and yet found themselves enraptured and breathless as this errant mongrel Paganini serenaded them through their streets and squares.
Kolzac, never having witnessed such wealth, such seeming extravagance, believed that here he would find what he had been looking for: a patronage, a sufficiently generous person to support him. He was thirty-five years old, ageless and indefinable, and he believed he would never travel nor hunger again.
It was in the winter of that year, three years before Germany, citing maltreatment of its own nationals within Poland, rolled her tanks and troops across the borders and started World War Two, that Jozef Kolzac saw Elena Kruszwica, a sixteen-year-old Polish Jewess. She stood in the doorway of a butcher’s store, holding her provisions, and watched as this crazed Rasputin figure, his eyes brighter than any jewels, his hair wilder than the mane of any lion, flipped his body through gambols and cartwheels, his stringed instrument dancing such fine melodies, performing with such panache and abandon for the townsfolk, that she was enchanted, mystified, excited. She returned to watch him time and again, and he felt her presence each time she appeared, sometimes so bold as to dance towards her, to watch her shrink back in the doorway, her laughter, her face beneath her scarf, her hands clapping in thick woollen gloves as he bowed and stepped back, collecting the coins and applause of these people.
Understanding little of what she felt, Elena Kruszwica became fascinated, enamoured by this man, this wild gypsy creature blown down from the hills into Lodz.
Her parents asked of her whereabouts, why she took so long to collect the provisions and she, embarrassed, or fearful perhaps, answered with white lies and half-truths that seemed in some way to bring her closer to this crazed genius Kolzac.
In November of that year she stopped coming. Kolzac played in the streets, the squares, but his music was hollow, performed with the obligation of self-preservation, having somehow lost its magic, its real enchantment. He searched for her, asked of her, and found that she had only been sojourning in Lodz, that her hometown was Tomaszow, a handful of miles south. He walked there at night, running much of the way, his instrument roped to his back, his pockets filled with coarse black bread and a fistful of cheese wrapped in linen, a blanket around his head and shoulders against the bitter, bone-freezing cold.
He was there as she walked to her piano lesson the following morning, there in the street as she turned the corner, and these people – Elena, a mere teenager, understanding little of life, little of being a woman – and Jozef, knowing nothing of life but the music the old man had taught him – stared at each other for minutes before speaking.
They believed in one another it seemed, for she never took her lesson that morning, and he never played through the streets of Tomaszow, and for the hours until evening they walked and talked, laughed and sang together in the fields and woods beyond the town.
Perhaps love, perhaps fascination, perhaps none of these: it did not seem to matter. For three days they were together but for the hours that they slept, Elena telling her parents that she was studying in the house of a friend, and he content to do nothing but be there for her. They spoke of life and love and laughter; they spoke of dreams and aspirations; they spoke of a future yet unrevealed and a past which now seemed to bear no significance to the present. The present was what they had themselves created, and it was within this present that they cared little but for one another. Elena was a girl of passion and spirit, a spirit constrained by the etiquette and protocol of a life to which she believed she did not belong. She sought freedom: freedom from the person she was expected to be, freedom to be whom she chose. Jozef granted her that freedom, granted it without payment of penalty, and this – perhaps above all – was the reason she loved him.
And then life reached them, and Elena – having no coins, having given all of her laughter and applause – gave everything else she had. Beneath the roof of a barn, within a tumbled-down mountain of straw, she lay down for Jozef Kolzac, and Jozef – tears in his eyes, an emotion filling his heart that he had never before experienced – gave his virginity and took hers. He was thirty-five, she was sixteen, and perhaps no greater well-meant love ever breathed or spoke or walked the earth.
Elena turned seventeen in January of 1937, and it was in this same month that she became aware that her monthly cycle had ceased, became aware of her condition, and ran from her home to Jozef. He understood, took her away, and the pair of them walked, taking assistance offered by itinerant journeymen, wanderers and travelers on horseback or with carts.
They reached Lublin to the east by February, and here Jozef Kolzac, a father-to-be, fully cognizant of his responsibilities, played for two, bringing money and food to his pregnant Elena where she worked as a maid, a cook and a cleaner for a family related to the town’s mayor.
And it was in Lublin where her parents found her, where they brought the menfolk of Lodz who had heard word of this dreadful act of depravity and kidnap. Kolzac was taken by his hands and feet, he was beaten and whipped, and then he was hung from a tree in the nearby woods, his body left for the birds and the wolves.
Elena Kruszwica was returned to Lodz, insane with rage and grief, and in the care of the town’s doctor she was retired until the birth of her son in August. She was seventeen, and once her strength had returned she took her son and fled from Lodz into the Carpathians, the home of her child’s father. Her parents searched for her in vain, searched until the Germans invaded in September of 1939, and when the Russians came less than a month later, once again to rape and assault their country, Elena’s family understood that they had lost her, that they would never see her again. Her mother took her own life as the Russians stormed into Lodz, and her father – a strong and stubborn man – ran from the house screaming and was cut down in a hail of communist gunfire that left his body decimated and bloody, lying there in the snow much as the body of his only grandson’s father had done in Lublin.
Elena, finding only solitude and poverty in the mountains, returned to seek work and shelter in Krakow. It was here, towards the summer of 1941, that she was seiz
ed and questioned by Nazi troops. Proclaimed a Jew, a belief and faith that had dissolved in the moment of her lover’s death, she and her four-year-old son, Haim, were transported by cattle truck to a town in Upper Bavaria, just twenty kilometres north-west of Munich.
Here they found their home for the next four years: a place called Dachau.
To describe the horrors, to feel the suffering, to understand the pain … These things happened, and yet later there were those who tried to convince the world that such things had never taken place at Dachau.
Those summer months – July, August, on into September – became the birthing ground of true revelation for Elena and her four-year-old son. A ranking officer, Wilhelm Kiel, a man indoctrinated with the Nietzschian concept of Man and Superman and the birth of the true Aryan Race, took this twenty-one-year-old Polish Jewess to his quarters, a wooden barrack room separated from the junior officers by a gravel walkway. Here, she was subjected to barbaric acts of sexual depravity, subjugated and overwhelmed, forced to the limits of sanity as he vented his sadistic fervor. He was tall, broad-shouldered, blond-haired, a Gestapo prodigy, and sexually insatiable. He would return from his duties to find her cowering beneath the bed, her son clutched in her arms, past tears, past screaming, and he would stripe her back with heated wires, tie her down and sodomise her, beat her across the back, the shoulders and the breasts with the flat of his hand, burn her with cigarettes and a crude brand fashioned from a length of metal into the word JUDE. Laughing, spitting, shouting, holding her by her hair as he bent her backwards over the table, raping her time and time again as her son crouched in the corner and watched, wide-eyed and confused.
She fell pregnant, he beat her into a miscarriage; she became infected with lice and swellings upon the skin that burst and seeped, and Kiel threw handfuls of salt over her; he cut her hair to the scalp, branded the back of her head, and as he thrust himself into her he would shout ‘Jude! Jude! Jude!’
Such things as these, daily, week after week, running into months, years it seemed, and beneath this torture and abuse her memory of Poland, of Jozef Kolzac, of Lodz and Tomaszow, of everything she had been and possessed and believed before KZ Dachau, faded into a distant blur. She became a nonperson, feeding her son with scraps of blackened filthy bread, sucking moisture from the threadbare carpet into which rain had leaked through the bare wooden floor, nursing her wounds, her shame, her debasement. She ceased to consider herself a human being, and though more times than she could recall she had challenged the justice and equity of God, it was during these times that she realized with utter certainty that God could not exist. Her spirit broken, the freedom she had once sought with Jozef now shattered beyond repair, she breathed solely because she could not stop herself; she slept because her body could stand no longer, and she survived each hour, each minute, each second, simply for her son.
Elena endured her ignominy and anguish in silence, a shell of who she once was. She watched as her fellow Jews and Poles were shipped out to Birkenau, Treblinka, Sobibor, and perhaps – had it not been for her son – she would have run to them, clung to them in her despair and begged to be taken in the trucks, in the horse-carriages to something that could only be better than this. At least silent, without agony, a vacuum of pain.
But her son kept her alive. She watched him grow in stunted inches, watched his eyes deepen, hollow out, perhaps the only future conceived that of taking him away from this, if only beyond the gates, the wires and the sentry towers into the woods, the fields that stretched out as far as the eye could see. Somewhere out there was a world, a world she had lost, had been torn from, her voice shredded with pain, her heart thundering with fear and a profound lack of comprehension. Sometimes she believed she had died, and for her sins with Jozef she was consigned forever to this hell, but somehow, through this blackness of pain and humiliation she remembered his eyes, his genius, his imagination, and understood that a love such as this could never have sentenced her to such a term of punishment.
Kiel did not speak with her, he barked, he ordered her to her knees, onto her back, her stomach. He pulled her by her hair, often tearing clumps from her scalp when it grew back over the seared brand, and then he would sodomise her once more, burying his fingernails in her breasts and gritting his teeth as he hurt her, causing pain that at last left her insensate and numb.
April of 1945 found the Allies in Berlin, Americans and Russians meeting at Torgau on the Elbe, troop carriers and tanks rolling onwards in the heart of the Reich. With these events came the liberation of Flossenbürg, Buchenwald, Mauthausen, and the full realization of what had taken place. The soldiers – victorious, elated – grew subdued, stunned, silent and sickened as they drove through the corridors of bodies, saw a heap of unclothed women prisoners eighty yards in length, thirty yards wide and four feet high. Buchenwald still housed over twenty thousand prisoners, many of them beyond all help – stick-thin, suffering from typhus, starvation and tuberculosis. In the days that followed, despite every effort from the Allies, more than six hundred human beings were buried daily. A wheeled scaffold stood against the skyline, from which hung a dozen beaten and broken bodies; the air was thick with the stench of rotting corpses, dead of disease and starvation, gassing and slaughter.
Soldiers in their late teens and early twenties liberated Dachau. Soldiers who walked amongst the dead with the eyes of men three times their age. Piles of human ashes, unburned bones, hair shorn from the newly dead, toys taken from children as they were led to the ‘showers’ – the gas chambers into which men, women and children had been herded in their tens of thousands – and ‘sound machines’ built to mask the horror of screaming. The Allies had discovered the Final Solution, the attempted extinction of a race.
Elena Kruszwica was there to see the soldiers, standing ankle-deep in mud in the small garden behind Wilhelm Kiel’s barrack, there as her now seven-year-old son clung to her leg, asking her who these people were as she fell to her knees, as she heard the screams and shouts of the SS troops being herded into the central square of the camp for surrender to the Americans. Kiel was there, his uniform – and his rank – discarded now, believing he could be filed away with the rest of his men. Elena ran towards him, ran through the American soldiers who tried to hold her back, and lunged for him as he cowered and fell to his knees. With her hands she clawed at his face, tore at his eyes until his features were spattered with blood, gouged and tormented.
The Americans did nothing, watching in horror and disbelief, and when she turned and stared at one of them, holding out her hand, her eyes demanding, her face filthy and grim and resolute, the soldier could do nothing but unclip his gun and hand it to her.
Elena Kruszwica held the gun against Kiel’s face, and Kiel – screaming at her, begging for mercy, pleading for his life until he was hoarse – fell into shocked silence as she spat at him, and then pulled the trigger.
These soldiers, these young men – so valiant, so victorious – were welcomed to Dachau by a woman their own age who looked twenty years their senior, a woman with the word JUDE burned into her flesh, into the back of her head, into her breasts.
Elena turned as trucks filed through the gates, as the earth trembled beneath her feet, and then she saw her son, her Haim running towards her, running straight towards her across the path of a jeep. Screaming, she charged out, her feet sliding through the mud, her voice audible over the sound of the engines, reaching him just in time to catch him and hurl him forward away from the jeep’s wheels. And in this moment she understood: understood that her willingness to die to give him freedom had arrived, for the jeep skidded away from the boy and hit her. Had she been strong and healthy, had she not suffered four years of mental and physical torture at the hands of the Nazis, perhaps she would have survived. But she was not strong, she was emaciated and weak, a broken spirit, a battered body, and the impact of the vehicle killed her within moments. She died with her eyes open, having seen, and then reflecting the sight of a United States Army se
rgeant picking up her son and holding him close. She died with something resembling a smile on her face, knowing that somehow the boy would see beyond these wires, out into the fields, the woods, the world she remembered before the death of the boy’s father and the rape of her country.
The soldier who held the boy was a Jew himself. His name was Daniel Rosen, and the jeep that had killed the boy’s mother was his own, driven by his aide. Stunned and shocked, he held the boy closer, watching as his fellow soldiers picked up the woman’s body, carried it to the back of a truck and wrapped it in a blanket. Rosen walked with the child, held him carefully, listened to his breathing, understood that nothing could be said to reach this soul, and they stood together at the tailgate of the vehicle. Rosen lifted the corner of the blanket, revealed the almost angelic expression on Elena Kruszwica’s face. The child – wide-eyed and drawn, his cheeks sunken beneath his bones, his forehead high, his hair thin on an almost translucent skull – said nothing; merely reached out and touched his mother’s mud-spattered face. It was said that Daniel Rosen cried for the child, but no-one was sure.
Rosen, commanding an infantry unit, did what he could before medical battalions arrived, before the doctors and nurses stepped from the trucks and administered watered milk, penicillin, sulfa-based immune system fortifiers – whatever they could to stem the tide of dying that continued for weeks after the liberation.