by Pat Conroy
“No one believes this man Lauber. The Gestapo discovers him. They take him, his wife, his children, his parents, and two other families in his house to the Jewish cemetery where all of them are shot. Only then does poor Lauber not look like a liar. Lauber’s wife dies screaming at him that he should not have come back.
“Hauptsturmführer Krüger is a cruel Philistine and a pig who tries to assume airs of breeding and sophistication that he has not earned. To Dr. Weinberger he talks of his love of Wagner, yet cannot name one of the arias he loves to whistle. Weinberger tells him about me and I am ordered to play the piano for a group of a German war staff who are on their way forward to the front lines. While they eat I play and I listen to the Germans talk about the war effort and their many successes on the Russian front. They talk like normal men until they get drunk when they begin to talk like Nazi soldiers. At this feast, they consume more meat than the Jews of the ghetto have seen since the walls of the ghetto went up. Then they go to the library for cigars and cognac. All except one officer, who comes beside the piano and listens to me play. ‘You still play like an angel. Even in times like this.’ I look up and see my friend Heinrich Baumann. He sits down beside me on the bench and we take turns playing music for each other. He plays Mozart and I answer him with Chopin. As we play, Baumann asks about my situation and that of my family. He tells me that I have much to worry about because I am a Jew. After that dinner, he drives me to my house in the ghetto in his jeep. Soldiers salute him. He is a fighting man, not SS. At my home, he comes in and meets Sonia and kisses my children in their sleep. He bows when he meets Saul Youngerman and my mother-in-law. In a sack, he leaves a wonderful supply of flour and cans of meat and sacks of cornmeal. When he leaves, Herr Baumann kisses me and apologizes for the entire German nation. We are still part of the brotherhood of music, he tells me. He is killed leading his men against the Soviet troops at Stalingrad.
“A good German? No. Herr Baumann fought for Hitler’s armies. At best, he was a member of the Judenrat like me. There are few Germans who could not forgive my participation in the Judenrat. They know me. I am one of them in some profound way that ties us together in all our sad humanity. We dance with the enemy and let him lead.
“Do you think you could throw your daughter Leah into a crematorium, Jack? Of course you do not. Your love for her is too great, correct? Let me starve you for a year. Let me beat you into submission. Let me kill everyone you love around you and work you until you drop. Let me humiliate you and fill your hair with lice and your bread with maggots. Let me test you to the limit and find out where civilization ends and depravity begins along the edges of your soul. Here’s what they did to me, Jack. At the end of the war, I could have thrown the Messiah himself into the fires of the crematorium and I would have done it for an extra cup of soup. I could throw Ruth, Shyla, Martha, Sonia, my sons, Leah, and everyone else into those fires and never think of it again. Here is the trick, Jack. You have to break a man down completely and then you own him. Let me break you like they broke me and I promise you would throw Leah into a fire, hang her by her neck, see her raped by a hundred men, then have her throat cut, and her bodily parts thrown to starving dogs in the street. I upset you. I am sorry. I tell you what I know. But know this: it is possible for you to kill Leah with your own hands because the world has come apart and God has hidden his face in his hands and you will think, by killing her, you are proving your love of Leah like never before. I would kill Leah, myself, tonight, before I would let her go through what I did, Jack. And I love your daughter more than I love any person on this earth.
“No, she does not remind me of the sons I mourn. Nor does she remind me of Shyla. She is much calmer and more composed than Shyla ever was. No, your Leah strikes me in a place I thought was dead. She reminds me of Sonia, my sweet, lost wife.
“Krüger seems to grow fond of me and it agrees with his pretensions about himself and his culture to have me play the piano while he dines. He gets drunk easily and he cries. His only son, Wilhelm, comes back from the Russian front to celebrate his nineteenth birthday. Both father and son get drunk and they make me play German folk songs over and over. Then they chase me out when two Ukrainian whores arrive for their appointment. The next day, ten Jewish young men are selected and driven fifteen kilometers to a field leading to a river. These Jews are told they can make a run for the river and if they reach the water they will be free men. Krüger and his son are in the middle of the field fifty meters away with high-powered hunting rifles. As the Jews run, father and son take turns shooting down the running Jews. They are excellent marksmen. No matter how they dodge or how fast they run, no Jew makes it to the river. Krüger tells me the story later one evening when he demands that I play nothing but Haydn.
“An old Orthodox rabbi named Nebenstall is caught praying and is publicly humiliated by the Gestapo. They make him spit on the sacred Torah until he can no longer spit. Then they make him urinate on the Torah. Then they want him to shit on the Torah, which he cannot do because he has not eaten. They bring him bread. Loaf after loaf, they stuff down his throat. But they are too vigorous in making him eat bread and they strangle him on the bread and leave him in the street. Jews fight over the bread they leave sticking out of the mouth of the dead rabbi. Another rabbi retrieves the defiled Torah and buries it with great solemnity and secrecy in the Jewish cemetery.
“In October the Judenrat is required by Krüger to make another selection, this time of one thousand Jews. The ghetto is shrinking still again. We choose the lowest Jews among us, the poorest and the most despised; the sick and the hungry are easy targets, and so are the very old who have produced no families of distinction. We protect our families and those of our friends. Each time we waltz with the enemy, we cheapen and degrade ourselves. After the selection is over and the trucks depart, the Nazis give us extra food for our families. For a loaf of extra bread, we sell the children of Israel into something far worse than slavery.
“My father-in-law takes me almost by force to his factory one day. The head of his clothing factory has followed the Russians out of the city and Saul has to take over its operation. It is a clothing factory that the Germans turn into an operation for the making of winter coats for the military. Saul puts me next to a master tailor and orders the man to teach me to sew a coat. I am furious and scream at him that I am a pianist and that this is a place where peasants work. Saul grabs me and shakes me. He is old but strong. Learn how to sew, he screams at me. Learn how to do something the Germans can use. That they need. So the master tailor shows me how to sew along a seam. He makes me do it until I do it right. There is a whole different set of things to know about zippers and collars. Saul comes by to check on me and we argue again. But he makes me come each day. I sew when I should be practicing scales. I sew when I should be mastering the great composers. I sew and I hate my father-in-law. I tell you now, over forty years later, that this man I hate, Saul Youngerman, wants to save my life by teaching me to be a tailor. The Nazis would have sent Beethoven himself to the gas chamber, unless he could have sewn a shirt for a soldier on the Eastern Front. He made me a musician and a tailor.
“A young Gestapo man named Schmidt causes great fear among the Jews. He has a habit of slapping down Jewish men in the street when he passes them by. Schmidt loves it because some of the older men begin falling to their knees at the sight of him. Once, I see this with my own eyes. Schmidt is walking down a street in the ghetto and every man is kneeling before him. I am one of those men.
“Schmidt looks like an albino and is a notorious rapist. He would rape Ukrainian or Polish girls as soon as he would rape Jewish ones. There is only one difference. The Jewish girls he defiles as their parents listen in the next room, and then he shoots them. Some of them are no more than children. Jews hide their daughters when word spreads that Schmidt is approaching the ghetto.
“Soon, you know that a Jewish life is worth less than nothing. This is the only sure thing in the ghetto. Starvation becomes the
daily lot. The search for food becomes a desperate thing. The fourteen entrances of the ghetto are all guarded by Ukrainian police. Some of the Ukrainians are kind and they suffer the same horrors as the fate of the Jews they try to help. Low-life Jewish informers testify about the kindness of the Ukrainians and they are removed from these barriers, never to be seen again. The Ordnungsdienst wear a military-like uniform designed by their own members. They are Jewish police and they earn favors by acting as informants to the Gestapo. They are stooges of the Gestapo. But I must tell you they are no worse than I am. The ghetto is an abattoir and all of us are beasts marked for slaughter. The only way a Jew can prove his innocence in such a nightmare is to turn up dead. People begin to die of starvation and their bodies are stacked like firewood outside of apartment buildings. Envy of the dead is common.
“There are Jews worse off than other Jews. I watch the men in charge of removing fecal matter to the river. These are starved, horrible-looking men who pull the wagons as though they are broken-down horses. The work is degrading, agonizing. A smell hangs over them. Yet their work saves us all from epidemic. Most of them end up dying of typhus.
“Gisela is the name of Sonia’s mother. She is sweet and kind and beloved. But her husband, Saul Youngerman, drives her crazy by taking terrible chances. Saul bribes the Ukrainians and Jewish police. He finds ways to bribe even the Gestapo. He organizes a smuggling ring to bring food inside the ghetto. Even though he knows the consequences of his foolish acts, Saul Youngerman makes secret contact with the partisans who skirmish with German patrols in the countryside. A Jewish informant, a criminal by the name of Feldman, reports to the Gestapo that Saul has smuggled a gun into the ghetto. This is not true, but it is a death warrant for Saul Youngerman. His wife, Gisela, is taken to Gestapo Headquarters with him. Sonia and my sons would have been taken in also, but they are out in the streets with Sonia looking for extra milk. I find them after a frantic search through the ghetto—standing in the sewers hiding.
“That same night I play the piano at Krüger’s house for dinner. He gives no sign that he knows my father-in-law is in his hands. Before I can summon up the words or the courage to ask about them, he dismisses me for the night. When Sonia discovers I have not even asked him about the fate of her parents, she turns her face from me. Again and again, she turns away as I try to explain myself.
“Other members of the Judenrat come to see me about the fate of Saul and Gisela. We agree to go as one body to the office of Krüger to find out where they are so that at least we will have strength in numbers. Dr. Isaac Weinberger leads our delegation as the head of the Judenrat. Even the Nazis respect him because he treats and cures some members of the Gestapo when they break some bones after their truck goes into a ditch. When we see Krüger in his office, he strikes Weinberger with a swagger stick and beats the poor man while the others plead with him. Screaming, he tells us that there will be a special Aktion for the Judenrat and our Jew families if we do not learn to respect his position. Then he comes up to me and screams that he knows I am behind this visit. So, he says, you wish to see your father-in-law? I do not speak because fear renders me mute. But I nod my head. He tells me that he knows what to do with swine, that his grandfather raises swine, and that swine always end up the same way. Then he takes me to the slaughterhouse outside the ghetto and takes me inside. Here is where the Gestapo have set up their jail and interrogation center. I hear people screaming and moaning, but I see no one. Krüger walks fast and I follow him. The smell of blood and offal is everywhere, but I cannot tell if it is human or animal. We come to a guard at the door. Are the Youngermans up for a visit? he asks the German guard in colloquial German that he thinks I cannot understand. The guard smirks and says yes, they are up for a visit from anyone. I walk into the darkness and Krüger lights a lamp. They have hung Saul Youngerman on a meat hook. The spike has pierced him through the shoulder blades. I do not recognize his face because it has been beaten so badly. But he is still alive and his swollen eyes are fixed on something across the room. Following his eyes, I see Gisela hanging by her feet, naked, and eviscerated with a long slit from her throat to her pubic area. Her intestines hang out of her almost obscuring her face. Krüger walks out as I watch. I hear him vomit in the passageway.
“That night he has me play Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons for him at dinner.
“Even though she asks over and over, I never tell Sonia what I have seen at the slaughterhouse. I tell her that her parents have been taken away on a convoy. Nor do I tell the other members of the Judenrat. I do not feel that I should add any more to the common fear. By then, all of us know that we are at the mercy of lunatics and butchers. Sonia tries to hearten herself by thinking that her parents have been sent to work camps. I encourage this kind of thinking. Despair is a daily bread and there is plenty enough to go around.
“In July, one more Aktion and another five hundred Jews are taken out to the slaughter. The Jewish fire brigade is brought out in the countryside and forced to dig a mass grave. Then the poor Jews have to strip naked so their clothes can be used to make uniforms for the Reich. One young Jewish man named Wolinski lunges at a Gestapo guard as he stands in line ready to face the machine guns. He has hidden a six-inch knife taped to his thigh. The knife goes into the throat of the Gestapo man, who, strangling on his own blood, runs after Wolinski and stabs him with a bayonet. It does not take long. Wolinski is half dead when he plays his own special rendition of ‘Taps’ for the Nazis. To honor Wolinski, the Germans round up another five hundred Jews the next day for annihilation. I know. Along with other members of the Judenrat, I stay up all night to see which Jewish names are placed on the list. Always, we choose the poorest and most helpless Jews among us. Always, we choose the Jews we do not know or who are not related to us.
“All my life I have been a fanatic about cleanliness. But forget about hygiene in the ghetto. Like any other Jew, I have to survive in a landscape of utter filth. At night, the rats are emperors of the dark and we hear them rattling the pots and pans and desperately looking for scraps of food. The best place for rats is by the cemetery where they can grow fat on what meat they find on the bones of starved Jews. The bedbugs are so bad and so numerous that often we must rouse our children and go sleep out in the streets beneath the stars. In winter, we have no choice but to do war with the bedbugs, the roaches, and the lice. Water is precious. Even filthy it is precious. One night, an old Jew takes time to close his eyes and bless the piece of bread he is about to eat, when a rat leaps out of a closet and snatches the bread from the old Jew’s hands. The Jew goes berserk and kills the rat with his shoe, butchers it, and cooks it over an open fire, then devours it ravenously. A rabbi comes to him, not to chastise the old Jew for eating unkosher food, but to find out how the animal tastes. Such is the desperation of the Jews of Kironittska.
“A criminal named Berger is put in charge of the Ordnungsdienst after its first boss is shot down in the street by the Oberscharführer for not carrying out an order quickly enough. This Berger is built strong as a bull and is a common laborer carrying freight at the railroad station. He is a drunkard, a lout, and dumb as a goy, Jack, if you will excuse the expression. Jews like this Berger are sickening to other Jews, but they are circumcised according to the covenant so what is one to do? The Nazis don’t care if it’s an Einstein or a Horowitz once they find the mezuzah on the doorpost and the foreskin cut. Berger is armed with a club and a uniform and he loves to beat educated Jews into submission. Some fear him more than they fear the average German soldier.
“Some Jewish girls become whores for the Nazis or for anyone else who can feed them. If a German soldier sleeps with a Jewish girl, it is death for both of them because of the racial laws. But men will be men and women, women, and for food, one will do anything. Because I am a member of the Judenrat, we have more food than the others, so I do not worry as much.
“One day in the main street of the ghetto I am walking home from the factory after a day of reconditioning fur co
ats into warm uniforms for German soldiers on the Eastern Front. I am exhausted by the work and so little hope. I am walking slowly home, head down, trying to attract the attention of no one, which is the best method of survival always. A commotion is suddenly around me like a storm. Many shouts, people yelling and crying. I look up and two members of the Gestapo have caught two young Jewish boys smuggling food into the ghetto. One boy is ten and the other is nine. They are brothers and they are crying as the soldiers slap their faces hard again and again. It is a square where they take these boys and there are nooses hanging from a scaffold where they hang Jews and Poles and Ukrainians who displease the Nazis. The Nazis love to hang people to make examples to others. Krüger drives up at this very moment in a jeep.
“Both boys are crying hard as they are forced toward the scaffold, but since they are obviously just boys I think that they will be all right. They have been trying to smuggle tins of fish and a bottle of vodka into the ghetto, things that now fetch an unbelievable price. Like a charade, the boys are lifted up on stools and their hands are tied behind their backs and nooses are put around their necks. The scene is so ghastly and I hear Jews moaning because they know it will do no good to lift their voices in protest. I myself feel like I am walking through some unimaginable landscape that would make sense only if I am in a nightmare. I cannot take my eyes off the boys, who under ordinary circumstances would be playing soccer in some school yard. Then I hear my name being called and it is Krüger who sees me and orders me to come out of the crowd that has gathered. They are only boys I say with my head bowed and he strikes me with a riding crop on the face and I taste blood in my mouth. Then there is another outbreak of noise and a man fights his way to the front of the crowd. It is Berger, the pompous ruffian who leads the Ordnungsdienst. He cries out, ‘These are my sons. The sons of your obedient servant Berger, who will punish these sons within an inch of their lives. I so swear to my Maker.’