The Lost Shtetl

by Max Gross

  Ferka did his work quickly. A strip of tape went over the man’s chest. Another one went over his legs. “Put your hands together,” he instructed his captive. The man’s hands were fastened together. Gracefully, more strips of tape were applied to keep the man firmly fixed to his bed.

  After half the roll of tape was gone, and Ferka reasonably certain that his victim wouldn’t be able to escape without serious struggle, he put the rest of the roll in his jacket pocket, sat down on the chair across from the bed, and lit a cigarette—not bothering to look his victim in the eye until he was good and ready.

  “I have a gun right here,” Ferka finally said, taking the pistol out of his windbreaker and flashing it before his captive. “And I got this knife. So you just be very careful around me, you understand?”

  Like a young child, his victim nodded obediently.

  “Now look here,” Ferka continued, “I’m going to take those socks out of your mouth. If you scream, I’m going to cut your throat. If you come at me, I’m going to shoot you in the face. Do you get me?”

  The victim nodded again, looking as if he might break into tears at any moment.

  “I’m going to ask you a question,” Ferka continued, “and you’re going to give me the god’s honest answer—right?”

  Another nod.

  Ferka still had the gun in hands. He slid back the barrel, which made the frightening locking sound that it was ready to fire, and he crept slowly toward his victim. After looking the man in the eyes, just to make sure he was good and scared, he plucked the socks out of the man’s mouth.

  The man didn’t say anything. He looked far too frightened. He just tried furtively to catch his breath.

  “Now,” Ferka said, “why are you trying to track down Washo Zurka?”

  The victim looked perplexed for a moment, but his face began changing as it slowly dawned on him why this ruffian had visited him.

  “Washo Zurka?” the victim said, his head suddenly a little straighter. “That’s why you’re here?”

  Ferka sucked on his cigarette without removing it from his mouth. “You heard me.”

  “I didn’t mean to bother him,” the victim said. “Really. Honestly. I had no idea he would send you here.”

  “Yeah? Then what do you want from him?”

  “Nothing,” the victim said. “Honestly! I swear, I’ll never bother him again.”

  “Why’d you call him half a dozen times last week and get that girl to call him, too?”

  “I just wanted to talk. But it’s not important now. Truly.”

  The smoke from Ferka’s cigarette slowly rose to the ceiling and silhouetted his small, childlike body, making him look ghostly. Indeed, Ferka was the sort who knew the tricks to menacing a bigger man. While some of his cousins would never break into a stranger’s house without wearing a ski mask or some other disguise, Ferka believed that if one truly intended to throw a fright into someone, it was critical to prove to them that you were fearless. A mask suggested that someday your captor might have the upper hand on you—but Ferka believed it scarier to show that you couldn’t be intimidated by threats from the future.

  “Listen to me,” Ferka said, without moving. “You just said to me that you were going to give me the god’s honest truth, did you not? And that’s exactly what I came here for. None of this bullshit, you hear me? Now, why are you trying to get a hold of Washo Zurka?”

  The victim nodded vigorously. “I just wanted to know if he’d heard of Yankel Lewinkopf.”

  Ferka continued to stare at his victim. “Who’s that?” he asked after a moment.

  “He’s a mental patient,” the victim said with an uneasy laugh. “I was a fool for taking anything he said seriously. But he’s a young man in the mental ward at Our Lady of Mercy. And he told me that Mr. Zurka helped him get to Smolskie.”

  Ferka didn’t say anything.

  “It’s a weird story,” the victim continued. “He’s a Jew who says he’s from a town in the middle of the forest. It sounds stupid now, but he says that a band of gypsies came through his town a couple of months ago and he hitched a ride with them. The only name he remembered was Washo Zurka. I was just trying to find out if there was any truth in the boy’s story. That’s all.”

  The ominous mien that Ferka had perfected suddenly seemed to vanish. This burglar now just looked confused.

  “You mean the kid from Kreskol?” the gypsy asked. “Slender kid. Not too tall. Couldn’t quite grow in a beard. Yeah, we gave him a ride to Smolskie a couple of months back. So what?”

  5

  Jubilee

  It’s peculiar, I suppose, that after our many decades proving to the world exactly how disinterested we were in its comings and goings, we should all have collectively changed our minds at once. But that’s more or less what happened.

  Yankel’s role in our rediscovery came to a relatively speedy conclusion after Dr. Meslowski’s brief capture.

  The kidnapping was never reported to the Smolskie authorities as an “abduction” or a “seizure” as such. It was, however, recounted in all its frightening particulars to Dr. Meslowski’s colleagues, seated around him in Our Lady of Mercy’s conference room, listening as intently as if he were the lone survivor of a shipwreck.

  Dr. Meslowski spoke about how he had trembled violently as he answered his abductor’s questions. He tried to be as disarming as possible. He openly wept and made oaths and used every trick he could think of to convey just how innocent his inquiry into the gypsy uncle had been. He begged for his life. He pleaded for mercy.

  But for his abductor’s part, Dr. Meslowski’s anguish proved more of an amusement than a threat. He sat smoking cigarettes, allowing the ash to collect in a small gray heap on the carpet, before he spoke. Yes, he said, the young Jew had been pawned off on one of the widows, who was grateful for the company. What of it?

  “So there really is a Kreskol?” Dr. Meslowski had asked.

  “Of course.”

  When his abductor finally agreed to cut Dr. Meslowski loose, it was on condition that he not breathe a word about what had transpired to anyone.

  “I’m positive I can tell you,” Dr. Meslowski assured his audience and then, almost involuntarily, glanced over his shoulder to make sure the young gypsy hadn’t somehow slipped into the room. “But I don’t think it would be wise to go running to the police.”

  It was agreed, calling the police would be an unnecessary complication. Nevertheless, phone calls to the voivodeship’s office* should be made the same day. Now that it was established that Kreskol was a real place, with real inhabitants, these matters needed to be attended to urgently.

  Dr. Babiak took it upon herself to make the first call to the governor, and felt silly explaining it to the administrator who answered the phone.

  “There’s a secret shtetl filled with Jews which survived the war,” Dr. Babiak said when she was asked what the call was about. “There’s no danger, so far as we know. They’re all living just as they always did. But we thought we should tell somebody about it.”

  The other end of the line was silent for several moments before the secretary spoke.

  “What’s a shtetl?”

  And while the hospital spent months dithering to and fro, the wheels of government moved surprisingly rapidly. Several deputies called back, and the governor himself got on the phone a few hours later. He apparently believed that this little village had the potential to become a big media story—a modern-day Brigadoon, if you will—and everyone should be prepared. An elderly Yiddish translator was summoned from Warsaw, and several government officials descended on Our Lady of Mercy to interview the various parties involved. When they were satisfied that no hoaxes were being pulled, it was agreed that the government had a duty to visit Kreskol and welcome it to its rightful place in contemporary Polish society.

  “The only thing left to do is to actually locate Kreskol,” said Rajmund Sikorski, the slight, middle-aged official the voivodeship sent to Our Lady of Mercy H
ospital. “We will take a helicopter over the forest tomorrow.”

  The helicopter took off from the outskirts of town and landed in the center of Kreskol the next day, and Yankel—who had left town as an expendable, acceptable loss in the course of finding the truly important people—was suddenly thrust into a heretofore unimaginable position of authority and wisdom.

  The people of Kreskol had gathered in a crowd, the size of which Yankel had never seen before. They stared in stupefaction. They wept. And for the moment, Yankel was as puzzled as the gentiles. Then he heard one of the townspeople look at the translator and cry: “Moshiach!”

  The throngs followed suit, shouting “Moshiach, Moshiach, Moshiach!” over and over.

  For not the first time since he had left home months earlier, he realized just how simple and artless the people he left behind were. The poor souls. (Of course, three months ago Yankel would have no doubt had the same reaction.)

  “What is going on here?” the Rabbi asked. “Is this the Messiah?” And Yankel began to explain what I recounted a few chapters earlier.

  After the initial shock had worn off somewhat, it was decided that the succeeding business should be conducted in a less public setting.

  “Who are these people?” Rabbi Sokolow asked Yankel, after the trio had been trotted into his study and examined by the old and esteemed of Kreskol. (The younger and less educated were crammed into Rabbi Sokolow’s hallway, each with their ears pointed to the Rabbi’s oak door eager to hear the miraculous news for themselves.)

  “This man is Rajmund Sikorski,” Yankel said, introducing the short, bespectacled gentile with the receding hairline who carried with him the aura of leadership. “He is with the voivodeship.”

  “And who is he?” Rabbi Sokolow asked, pointing to the aged, shrunken Jew who had jumped out of the chariot with the gentile.

  “His name is Gerard . . . something,” Yankel replied. “He’s here to translate.”

  Rabbi Sokolow looked as if he tried to weigh his words before he spoke—anxious not to offend anyone’s sensibilities, particularly one who might have the imprimatur of holiness.

  “So he’s not the Messiah?” Rabbi Sokolow asked.

  The translator chuckled softly to himself. “No, I’m not anybody important,” he ventured in Yiddish. (A more worldly observer would place his accent in Riga.) He then gestured to the gentile chieftain. “He’s the important one.” Which were largely the last words he would speak for himself.

  “Good people of Kreskol,” the translator said a few moments later for the chieftain. “I am here to fill you in on everything you might have missed.”

  Yes, we missed a lot.

  I have sometimes lost track of what Sikorski told us that afternoon and what we later learned over the next few months, but the fundamentals of the last century were recounted: World War II; the Cold War; the creation of the state of Israel; the collapse of the Soviet empire; a man on the moon; the eradication of polio; the instant coffee powder (even if normal coffee was an unfamiliar commodity in these parts).

  When Sikorski spoke about World War II, he was determined that we would not be left with the same doubts as Yankel Lewinkopf: He produced eleven photographs, which he placed on the Rabbi’s wooden desk, for each man to examine for himself. “Millions died,” the gentile explained, pointing to the glossy black-and-white images of Babi Yar, Auschwitz, and Treblinka. “Poland was almost completely cleansed of Jews.”

  As he said the word “cleansed,” the gentile’s face changed color, as if he had accidentally said something impolite.

  We all nodded, respectfully, but I still don’t think anybody truly understood the magnitude of what he told us—except, perhaps, Rabbi Sokolow and Rabbi Katznelson, who lingered over the photos longer than the rest.

  “This was, of course, only the beginning of Poland’s troubles,” the gentile said through the voice of his translator. “For the next fifty years, we would live under the yoke of the Bolsheviks.”

  And with that he proceeded to tell us a condensed version of how Poland, from the late 1940s until the late 1980s, abided according to the whims and dictates of their neighbors to the east, and how cruel and unfair life was in those years.

  The gentile was somewhat more animated talking about the Bolshevik calamity than the German one. He told us how the Bolsheviks had taken over the chess clubs and local sports clubs, how they printed phony propaganda sheets dressed up as newspapers and how even after neutering their political rivals they still had to steal elections rather than win them honestly. And I supposed that if anyone had a clue as to what a Bolshevik looked like—or what the term meant—we would have run screaming at their very mention.

  Naturally, the names that the gentile sprinkled his talk with—Wladyslaw Gomulka and Witold Pilecki*—were forgotten almost as soon as they were spoken. But a visitor should be allowed to say his piece. Rabbi Sokolow didn’t even interrupt him to ask if his wife couldn’t, perhaps, offer the man a glass of tea.

  We had questions—hundreds of them. And I am a little embarrassed to admit now that they were mostly limited to the contraption sitting in the center of our town. Nevertheless, the gentile patiently explained what he knew about air travel.

  “I don’t know very much about the mechanics of how a helicopter works,” he declared after he had given us an abbreviated history of two Americans named Wilbur and Orville Wright, a discontinued airline called Pan Am, and a fearless pilot named Lindbergh (who was not Jewish, despite the fact that Reb Dovid Levinson said it sounded like a Jewish name). “But I can tell you that it is not magical in any way. I can assure you of that. Not magical.”

  Nobody believed him.

  “Now,” said Rabbi Sokolow almost as if it were an afterthought, “what’s this business Yankel said about the Messiah coming back to earth and the Jews returning to Israel?”

  As he said this, we all turned to the boy in question, whose face reddened.

  Shortly after the Polish government became interested in Kreskol, the doctors informed Yankel (with more formality than he was accustomed to) that now they had discovered evidence of Kreskol’s existence they took it on good faith that his story must be more or less true and he would be returning to his hometown shortly.

  “When will I go back?” he asked Dr. Babiak.

  She shrugged. “Tomorrow—maybe the day after.”

  Yankel was frightened by the immediacy of this. He said nothing at first, but after several hours of meditation, he wondered if it wasn’t too late to withdraw his request to leave the hospital.

  Not that he didn’t still think that the stories of mass slaughter sounded outlandish. But the doctors who had been looking after him (most of them, anyway) were honest people, who looked genuinely hurt when he said that he didn’t believe their tales about World War II.

  He liked things in the ward, where the climate was cool, even in the middle of August; where the bed was both firmer and softer than any he had ever slept on; where unpolluted water came gushing out of the faucet with a simple turn of a knob; and where everyone cared for his well-being. Maybe they are all crazy, Yankel said to himself, but does it really matter?

  It was shortly after he had come to these realizations that he was led—almost by accident—to the topic of Israel and David Ben-Gurion.

  None of the psychiatrists at Our Lady of Mercy had ever reached the propitious postscript in their retelling of the Holocaust. Perhaps they were too beguiled by Yankel’s skepticism. Maybe the expanse and sweep of history exhausted them. It’s possible they thought that if the young man was dubious of the wholesale slaughter of Jews, how could he possibly be expected to believe that a scrounging, scraggly group of refugees fought off a half dozen Arab armies to achieve the historical realization of their race?

  Either way, when Sikorski arrived at the hospital for his interview with Yankel, he casually mentioned that the American and Israeli ambassadors would no doubt want to meet him, and Yankel didn’t have a clue what he was talkin
g about.

  “What do you mean—Israeli ambassador?” Yankel asked.

  “The Israeli ambassador. Jerusalem’s man in Poland.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  And after Sikorski realized that nobody had bothered to tell Yankel that the Jews had returned to their ancestral homeland, he took on the duty himself.

  “The exile is over?” Yankel asked, incredulous.

  Sikorski pondered this question for a moment.

  “Yes,” he said finally. “Some Jews prefer exile. But they can return anytime they like.”

  “When did this happen?”

  Very briefly Sikorski explained the bare bones story of David Ben-Gurion, the Irgun, the 1948 War of Independence, and the subsequent wars and skirmishes Israel had been involved in ever since.

  “It sounds as if this man, Ben-Gurion, was the Messiah,” Yankel declared.

  Sikorski sat unmoved for a few moments.

  “I suppose.”

  Yankel felt dizzy and needed to spend the rest of the afternoon in bed.

  Sikorski recounted the same story in more muted, sober tones a day later in Rabbi Sokolow’s study, refusing to enliven the tale with anything that could be considered grandiose—he merely told us that the Jewish Agency (something he never really defined) bought up empty plots of land in the 1920s and ’30s; he recounted the can-do spirit of the Russian and Ukrainian Jews who had settled together in kibbutzes on barren swamps and marshes that they spent their lives draining and turning into farms; how the Jews had terrorized the British administrators of the land and made a successful appeal to the UN before fighting off invading Arab armies. (No one knew what “UN” meant, either, but nobody wanted to interrupt.)

  “So Jerusalem is in the hands of the Jews?” asked one of the elders.

  “Certainly.”

  “What about the Wailing Wall?”

  “Yes.”

  “Has—”

  The elder almost looked embarrassed by his next question, as if he were trespassing a little too deep into fantasy. He fell silent for a few moments before he decided that he could no longer resist.