The Last Witness

by Jerry Amernic

  The older boy who came with Jacob the next time was Shimek Goldberg and he didn’t take kindly to Father Kasinski. He said it was fine if the priest gave them food and didn’t tell anyone how they came through the sewer into the Aryan side, but he said not to trust him.

  “He is a priest and he hates you because he thinks you killed Jesus,” Shimek said.

  Jacob didn’t know what Shimek meant. He only knew that Father Kasinski was kind to him. Then one day there was another roundup in the ghetto. The Gestapo, aided by the ever-present Polish police, went door to door and marched off with men. There was no rhyme or reason to it. They went into one building, but not another. They took Shimek’s father, they took Josef’s father and they took Jacob’s father, too. No one knew where they were going.

  “A klog iz mir!” cried Jacob’s mother, who went hysterical after the Gestapo walked off with Samuel. She pounded her fists against her head until her skin turned blue. She was several months pregnant by this time and feared she would never see her husband again.

  Jacob had told his parents about Father Kasinski. He had to after the blonde hair, but he never told them about the sewers. They thought he was still going through the wall.

  “I will ask Father Kasinski about Papa,” Jacob said to his mother.

  When Jacob told him what happened, Father Kasinski said he would ask around and a few days later Jacob’s father came back. He was wearing the same clothes – the same pants, shirt and jacket – but they were creased and dirty, and if he had style when he left he didn’t have it now. He didn’t say where he had been, but was glad to be reunited with his wife and son. Even if it was the ghetto.

  The next time Jacob and Shimek came up through the sewer, Father Kasinski was waiting for them. He said he had to speak with Jacob, so Shimek went on alone to the Aryan side.

  “It’s getting more dangerous for you and your family,” Father Kasinski said. “It’s getting more dangerous for all Jews. You must start learning.” He took Jacob into the kitchen and closed the door that led to the chapel. “I want you to listen carefully,” he said and then he spoke a language Jacob never heard before.

  “Ave Maria, gratia plena …”

  It rolled off his tongue like music. The last word he said was ‘amen’ and Jacob knew that from his Hebrew prayers.

  “Now you say it,” Father Kasinski said.

  “Say what?”

  “A-ve ma-ria …”

  “A-vuh ma-reeyaa.”

  “… gratia plena …”

  “Grah-teeya play-na.”

  “Good.”

  Father Kasinski said learning this prayer was important. He said it could even save Jacob’s life. It was Jacob’s first Hail Mary and he learned it quickly. Father Kasinski said he would teach it to Shimek as well, but Shimek wouldn’t want anything to do with it.

  From that day on, every time the two boys came up through the sewer Jacob went into the kitchen with Father Kasinski to study, while Shimek headed off to the Aryan side. Jacob would eventually join up with his friend before coming back several hours later, and the boys would then return to the ghetto. One day Father Kasinski said Jacob had to be baptised. Jacob asked him why.

  “To protect you.”

  Inside the empty church, he took Jacob to the altar where he had him bend down and kneel. He poured water – holy water he called it – over his head. “I baptise you in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” Father Kasinski said Jacob was now a Catholic, but Jacob insisted that he was a Jew.

  “You are forgetting something,” Father Kasinski said. “When you are on the other side you are a boy named Jacob who is a Jew but here on this side you are Jacub and Jacub is a Catholic. Now say it.”

  “Ave Maria, gratia plena …”

  Jacob knew it perfectly and in this way he learned about being a Catholic. He also learned the words to the Apostles’ Creed and the Lord’s Prayer. Much to Father Kasinski’s delight, he had many questions. One of them was this business about forgiveness. Jacob asked whom he should be forgiving. Father Kasinski said he should forgive anyone who sins, so Jacob thought of the German Gestapo and Polish police.

  “Should I forgive them?” he said.

  “You should forgive anyone who has forgotten how to behave like a human being.”

  “Even them?”

  “Even them.”

  “What about people who steal? Like Jacub.”

  Jacub had become Jacob’s alter ego. Another person.

  “Jacub is only trying to feed his family,” Father Kasinski said. “It is not stealing to try and stay alive.”

  “Should I apologize to Shmuel Zelinsky for taking his coat?”

  “You should apologize and also ask for his forgiveness but I think he will understand.”

  One time after many hours in the Aryan side Jacob was back in the alley behind the Church of the Virgin Mary. He didn’t go into the sewer with Shimek, but marched straight into the church where he saw the priests. He asked for Father Kasinski and a moment later he appeared. He took Jacob into the back and shut the door. Jacob was very upset.

  “I cannot forgive the Gestapo,” he said and the tears streamed down his face. “A man was walking on the sidewalk and they told him to walk in the gutter where all the Jews have to walk but he said he wouldn’t do that anymore so they shot him. They shot him right on the sidewalk. I watched him die.”

  Father Kasinski cradled Jacob’s head in his arms. The boy wasn’t even five years old. He should be in school, but there wasn’t any school for him. Father Kasinski held Jacob until he stopped crying, ruffling his fingers over and over through his blonde Aryan hair.

  ……………………………………………………………………….

  The sewers were another world where it was always dim. The only light came from light bulbs hanging from above, but they were spaced apart from one another so the shadows followed you wherever you went. Dim was good because it meant perpetual night and the night offered protection, but it was always cold and damp. Jacob came to know the sewers below the church very well and how to follow them into the next block where the ghetto began. Beyond that there were no sewers at all because the ghetto was the oldest part of Lodz. The best thing about the sewers was that no Gestapo or police watched your every move. The worst thing was the rats.

  Father Kasinski gave Jacob long, wool underwear and boots to keep warm, and they helped as long as he stayed dry. The first time Jacob ventured into the sewers with Shimek he was walking on a ledge where everything was wet. He slipped and fell knee-deep into the water. It was cold and dirty and it stunk. He regained his footing just when a hideous creature – half a meter long from its nose to the tip of its tail, and with flashing teeth and whiskers – scurried right in front of him on the ledge. From that moment on, Jacob kept a watchful eye out for the rats.

  July came and his mother was almost bursting. The baby was due any day and Jacob’s parents were trying to hide the pregnancy. If the Germans knew a woman was expecting, they would take the baby at birth, and that was why his mother stayed indoors. The only people she ever saw besides Jacob and Samuel were her sister Gerda, her niece Zivia, and her nephew Romek. There was talk of a midwife, but then word might get out about the baby. Another pregnant woman had been taken away from her family and never seen again. There was talk about this place Chelmno where they say Jews were being exterminated.

  “With the Gestapo it is best to think the worst,” Jacob’s father said and he asked about the sewers. He said they should leave their flat and escape to the sewers before the Gestapo come for them. And so, a decision was made. The Klukowsky family – Jacob, his mother Bela, his father Samuel – and the Zaltsman family – Jacob’s Aunt Gerda, and his cousins Zivia and Romek – would move to the sewers. One man, two women, one of them about to give birth, and three children.

  Zivia was ten and showing signs of blossoming into a young woman. She looked like her mother, Jacob’s Aunt Gerda, but with
out the cold stern spine of a Jewess who had lost her husband and was left lonely and bitter to fend for herself with two children. Jacob figured Zivia, who was six years older than him, was wise. She could prepare food and clean and look after her little brother Romek. No one had to tell her to do these things. Romek was also older than Jacob, but shy and withdrawn, and he never joined his younger cousin on his trips to the Aryan side. He was too big to get through the hole in the wall and lacked the daring of older boys like Josef or Shimek or the curiosity of younger ones like Jacob. Besides, he had an older sister who watched out for him. But there was another reason Romek never went to the other side.

  He looked Jewish.

  Jacob was the first down the ladder. He knew the way into the sewers. Then it was Zivia’s turn and then Romek’s, and for them this was an adventure. They hadn’t been out of their flat for months. Next came Jacob’s Aunt Gerda, but she found it awkward stepping down the ladder. Then Jacob’s father went, followed by his mother, who was nine months pregnant and with a belly so big she couldn’t face the ladder and had to climb down backwards with her hands behind her, feeling blindly along the railing. By the time she got to the bottom rung, she was practically sitting on her husband’s shoulders.

  Jacob knew of a small compartment and this was where they set themselves up. The only thing they brought with them was old blankets. When his mother was on her back on a bed of blankets, Jacob took his father through the sewers until they were directly below the Church of the Virgin Mary. Then he took him up the hole to meet Father Kasinski. Samuel had known about the kindly priest, but not about his son’s baptism or the Hail Marys.

  Jacob’s father explained their predicament and Father Kasinski listened intently. He promised to give them potatoes, onions and cucumbers from the garden beside the church. He said the priests grew more food than they needed and had plenty to spare. He also said he would give them meat, but it was pork sausage. Jacob’s mother was indignant when she saw it.

  “Treif,” she said. “I can’t eat this!” But Samuel insisted and he tore the biggest piece for her.

  Jacob didn’t know anything about foods to be avoided like pork and ham. The first time he tried ham was the sandwich made by Father Kasinski and it was delicious. He couldn’t get enough of it. He couldn’t get enough of any kind of meat Father Kasinski gave him. To refuse food because it was treif didn’t make sense when they were starving, and when his mother was about to give birth in the sewers it didn’t make much sense to his father either.

  Father Kasinski used a rope to lower the food in buckets, but was careful because the Gestapo, Polish police and Jewish police were always watching. He lowered blankets and saucepans and cups and plates. And the most important thing of all. Water. It was always done at a set time. When the bucket arrived, all six members of the Klukowskys and Zaltsmans would be waiting for it. Then the rats would appear. They would come from everywhere. Sometimes they were so quick they got into the food before anyone could touch it, and it didn’t matter if you beat them with a stick or threw a pan at them. So Jacob’s father had an idea. When the next bucket of food arrived, he hung it from a pipe running across the ceiling of the compartment that had become their home. This was the only way the rats couldn’t get at it. Jacob, Zivia and Romek watched the rats stand on their hind legs and reach for the food with their menacing teeth and their pointed noses. They even jumped to try to get at the food. They were so big.

  The buckets also collected their waste and so, a bucket would come with food, another would come with water, and an empty one would come for waste, and this was how they lived. The two families were huddled in a space that was little more than a cave with cobwebs, mud and the ever present rats. When it was time for the baby, Father Kasinski lowered a bucket filled with steaming hot water.

  Jacob had never stayed in one place for long since mastering the sewers. He was always on the go, travelling through the pipes, walking along the ledges below his tenement building in the ghetto and below the Church of the Virgin Mary. But not now. Father Kasinski told them all to stay put right below the church until the baby arrived.

  One morning they heard voices from the chapel. It was full of people, which meant it was Sunday. They were the voices of people praying and some of the prayers Jacob knew. “Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum.” He found himself mouthing the words and these moments were pleasant, his only pleasant moments in the filth and darkness of the sewers. His father said they had turned into human rats living below with real ones, but what could they do? Where could they go? A cold, wet wind broke through the deadly silence with a piercing whistle and there was always the constant stench of raw sewage. The first night Jacob couldn’t stand it, but by the third night he didn’t know if he could smell it or not.

  His mother’s labor pains began on a Friday afternoon. She was on a bed of blankets with more blankets spread across her, and when her pains started, Jacob’s Aunt Gerda stuffed a rag into her mouth because one scream and someone would hear. The only person who knew about them was Father Kasinski. Even the other priests didn’t know. Six hours into her labor, Jacob’s father said they needed candles. Jacob figured the baby was coming, and with candles they could see better, but no. It was the Sabbath, and his father wanted to light candles. He sent Jacob scurrying up the ladder.

  As always, Jacob had his stick with him and he used it to push on the bottom of the manhole cover, but it wouldn’t budge. He looked below and heard the voices of his father and his aunt and the garbled moans of his mother, who was soon to give him a little brother or sister. So he pushed again, harder this time, and the cover moved. It was the first time he ever pushed it open by himself. There was no Shimek. He went to see Father Kasinski and returned with a handful of candles from the church, and when the candles were lit his father spoke in Hebrew.

  “Barach attah Adonai eloheinu melech ha-olam. Ashe kideshanu bemitzvotav ve-tsivanu lehadlik ner shel shabbat.”

  Jacob would always remember this Sabbath. It was the last one his family would spend together.

  His mother, drenched in sweat from head to foot, was panting and crying into the rags stuffed between her lips to deaden the sound. Then, in the middle of the night, an explosion came from far away, but maybe not that far. It was hard to tell. And then there was a second explosion. Everything shook and rattled, and not only the pots and saucepans that Father Kasinski had sent them, but even the pipes. Jacob’s father thought it was an earthquake. He sent Jacob up the ladder again.

  Father Kasinski was staying near the door of the kitchen leading to the alleyway beside the church, and when he saw Jacob he knew why he had come.

  “Listen to me. The Germans know Jews are in the sewers. You aren’t the only ones. They are dropping grenades into the manholes. They want to kill you or at least get you out of there but they don’t know where you are. What is happening with the baby?”

  Soon, Jacob said, and back he climbed into the sewers.

  By now his mother was on the verge of passing out. His Aunt Gerda was wiping her brow with wet towels, making sure the rags between her lips stifled her moaning. Then finally, mercifully, her muffled cries stopped. It was a boy. Aunt Gerda cut the umbilical cord and washed the tiny baby with damp cloths. She wiped its eyes, nose and mouth, and Jacob couldn’t believe how small it was. Little more than a doll. It started crying and was so weak that it was almost a cry without a voice attached. Aunt Gerda closed the baby’s mouth with a soft “shh” and rocked the newborn in her arms. She moved him under his mother’s breast, but Jacob’s mother had no milk. Aunt Gerda tried grinding some of their food into water, but the baby wouldn’t take it. He just cried and cried.

  ‘Shh … shh … shh.”

  It was Sunday morning and by now they had been a full week in the sewers. There was singing from the church and then the singing stopped. Everything stopped. There was the sound of stomping feet and loud voices.

  Jacob wanted to see what was happening. Armed with his stick, h
e climbed up the steel ladder and pushed away the manhole cover. He got to his feet, replaced the cover over the opening, and wearing Shmuel Zelinsky’s coat went into the alleyway beside the church where he peered through a side window.

  German soldiers were inside yelling at the priests and the soldiers were angry. One of the priests was Father Kasinski. There was more shouting, and then the people sitting on the benches were ordered to get up and go, leaving the soldiers alone with the priests. There was more talking and more shouting. Two soldiers took Father Kasinski by the arms, and marched him into the kitchen and then out the side door to the alleyway. Jacob hurried behind the church so they wouldn’t see him, and watched from around a corner of the building.

  One of the soldiers struck Father Kasinski across the face, and there was something so hostile about it that it didn’t seem real. But Jacob could see it happening before his eyes. Then he realized that this wasn’t a soldier who had hit Father Kasinski, but the young Gestapo officer who always patrolled near the wall. After an approving nod from the soldier, the Gestapo officer – just a boy – hit Father Kasinski a second time. Now the soldier was yelling and Father Kasinski kept saying that he didn’t know what he was talking about. Then the soldier took out his pistol. He waved it in the priest’s face and even from a distance Jacob could see the terror in Father Kasinski’s eyes.

  The soldier and Gestapo officer talked some more and then the soldier put his pistol back into his holster. The two Germans escorted Father Kasinski to the front of the church, one on each arm, and by this time more soldiers had gathered around. They shoved Father Kasinski into the back of a car. Jacob saw the edge of Father Kasinski’s black robe caught in the door, fluttering in the air as they drove off in a cloud of dust.

  He never saw him again.

  Jacob ran back behind the church, pried open the manhole cover, and went down the ladder into the sewer where he found Aunt Gerda holding the baby. His mother was whimpering, his father was holding onto her and weeping, and Zivia and Romek were both crying. The only one not crying was the baby.