by Max Gross
When war was finally declared and the Germans goose-stepped through his town, the gentiles came out to greet their conquerors with bouquets of flowers and black crosses raised above their heads. The town square was festooned with leaflets from the invading army, promising freedom from international Jewry, Joseph Stalin, and Franklin Roosevelt.
Leonid’s uncle, one of the elders of Bruskevo, was tasked with selecting a Judenrat.* When he respectfully offered his objections, he was marched to the town square, where a German in uniform removed a Luger from his holster, placed it next to the sainted man’s head, and calmly pulled the trigger.
Spektor’s account had been interesting enough, but at that moment Sokolow sat up straight, as if he had received an electric jolt.
“You saw that?” Sokolow asked. “With your own eyes?”
Spektor didn’t answer, but a shadow fell on his hardened, scraggy face. He continued.
The perpetrator was a sallow, dark-haired Nazi captain, who wore gold-rimmed spectacles and a gray SS uniform with the skull-and-crossbones badge. He was not a low-ranking soldier, whom the government could claim had exceeded his authority should the incident ever be examined in a court of law.
The Nazi captain placed his gun back in its holster, took a handkerchief out of his pocket to wipe away a few spots of blood that had spattered on his hand, and walked unhurriedly back to Gestapo headquarters in the Bruskevo town hall.
When the assailant was out of sight, three young men stepped forward to retrieve the body, whose eyes were still open and lifelike.
“Halt,” commanded one of the Germans, who had mutely observed the scene. “Don’t touch him.”
So he lay for three days in the town square, until the stench became too much for even the Nazis and they ordered him tossed in the nearby river.
And this was only the beginning. Leonid witnessed dozens of other summary executions for infractions such as being without papers, being in possession of a contraband hard-boiled egg, being out after curfew, and so on.
The Spektor family sensed that the end was nigh, and the teenaged Leonid and his cousin Gavril were sent to separate gentile families in the countryside. Soon thereafter, the Jewry of Bruskevo were liquidated.
“The Nazis kept it secret,” Spektor said. “But not too secret. They did the same thing again and again in towns all over Poland and Lithuania. Word got out. The gentiles I was staying with heard the story a few months later.”
Under normal circumstances, the family who saved him—the Rymuts—would have turned Leonid away, but the Spektors had offered such an extravagant sum to house their son that the Rymuts felt they couldn’t say no.
Of course, there were plenty of gentiles who accepted a bounty from a Jew and then turned around and accepted a second one from the Germans, but the Rymuts declined to traffic in that kind of treachery. “Once you do that,” Adam Rymut remarked to his wife, Maja, “life becomes chaos.” She agreed, without second thoughts.
During his first year at the farm Leonid had been given a room in the house and he helped with the chores. However, when rumors came back that Jews were being hidden in a nearby village, and that the penalty for harboring them was death, Leonid was moved to the barn, where he lived in the hayloft above the cows. Six months later, a pit was dug for Leonid with a trapdoor, and he lived among the lice.
But doom was always lurking nearby. One of the Rymut daughters bought Leonid a newspaper in town, which nearly destroyed him.
“What are the Rymuts doing with a newspaper?” Olga Wojcicka asked her sister after observing the purchase. “I didn’t think they knew how to read.” Wojcicka felt duty-bound to report this suspicious activity to the Germans.
A search of the Rymut farm was conducted two days later, but Olga Wojcicka (whose chipped central incisor, straw hair, and squat stature bore a notable physical resemblance to the witch who boiled children into soap in the stories Leonid later told) had made reports of eight different families in the area whom she believed were harboring Jews, and the Germans had come up empty all but once. When they came for an inspection of the Rymut farm, the soldiers were wary enough of the source to leave without bothering to examine the surrounding property.
A second report, however, was made by a more restrained peasant named Piotr Mazurek, who said that he had come by the farm to trade some vegetables and had seen a pair of trousers on the clothesline. They were too small for Adam Rymut. And Rymut’s surviving children were all girls. Mazurek casually asked if anybody was staying with them. No, Rymut had said. Nobody.
This time, the Germans didn’t just go through the entire house and remove a floorboard to see if there were any hollowed-out rooms under the kitchen, but they went out to the barn and examined every stall of every animal.
Maja Rymut watched the scene unfold in dread, which she tried to pass off as indignation. “We are a good family here,” she barked. “We don’t break any laws and we don’t hide Jews. You have no right to treat us like criminals.”
The Germans asked to speak to her husband alone.
“There was a pair of pants hanging on your clothesline on Thursday,” the interrogator said to Adam.
“Yes . . .”
“They were men’s pants. And they could not have fitted you, sir—they were too small.”
Adam stared at his interrogator, who was shorter and huskier than he, for a few moments before speaking.
“You think that a girl on a farm doesn’t have occasion to wear men’s pants?” Adam asked.
It was a believable precept, as far as it goes, even though each of the Rymut daughters at that very moment was wearing a dress—all soiled from the morning’s labor.
When the German asked to see the garment in question, Adam produced a pair of trousers that fit the eldest Rymut daughter. (The Germans hadn’t noticed that Adam had taken the trousers not from his daughters’ room but his departed son’s.)
Even though the Germans came away empty-handed, the Rymuts were shaken. “They’ll be back,” Adam Rymut said to his wife. “He must leave immediately.”
And so Leonid was sent away with a pillow, blanket, and sack of food, where hopefully the Poles leading the resistance would help him.
That proved a mistaken assumption. When Leonid ran across two armed figures in the forest they initially appeared to take him into their confidence. He was taken back to their hideout, given a cup of warm milk, and turned over to the Germans the next day.
He was stuffed into a boxcar, cheek to jowl with a hundred others. (More than a thousand, maybe, if you counted every single human being on the entire train.) The train convulsed through the countryside for two days at an unbearably slow speed—starting and stopping in fits—before coming to a halt at a cold, isolated spot where the prisoners were made to sit and suffer for another two days without food or water.
He watched several elderly passengers near him collapse and slip into the throes of unwept, infinite death.
But the Germans refused to tend to them. Refused to listen to their final, pathetic whimpers. Refused to even remove them from the boxcars until their bodies had stiffened and the stink of ordure had settled over the survivors. It was an effluvium that would follow Leonid for the remainder of his captivity.
Upon arriving at the camp, he was looked over by a German doctor, and told to go to the right; he never again saw the people who were sent to the doctor’s left.
Some of these unfortunates must have sensed the fate that awaited them. When the fathers of these damned women and children objected and asked not to be separated, the Germans lied mechanically. “You’ll see them later,” answered the examining doctor.
Leonid was ordered to disrobe with the other men. The room was frigid, which caused him to shiver and his flesh to turn goose-like.
In the stark coldness, the dimness and the nakedness of the scene unfolding around him, Leonid began to sob, silently, certain that all hope was lost.
A few of the other prisoners glared at him. Youth and
softness were liabilities, and in the first—but certainly not last—breach of camaraderie, he was told to shut up or someone would shut him up. When he didn’t conceal his emotions quickly enough, a tall, square-jawed Russian punched Leonid in the stomach, hard. (He felt it for days after.)
“That would set the tone for the rest of my time at Auschwitz,” he told Sokolow. “It was a state of nature, where the only law was that of immediate, unquestioning obedience. Allegiances and friendships could be rescinded for a better relationship with the Kapo,* or a more favorable work detail.”
Leonid was led into a freezing shower. He was then given two oversized wooden shoes, a striped uniform that was a size too large (a “zebra suit,” as it was called by the inmates), and a yellow star to punctuate his low status as a Yid. His hair was shorn and he was brought before a toothless Polish Jew who told him to stretch out his left arm, and with neither permission nor explanation, six bluish-black numbers were etched onto his forearm.
He asked his brander what would happen to him.
“Don’t ask questions,” the toothless prisoner replied. Questions were another sign of weakness.
But Leonid Spektor’s punishment and unhappiness were destined to be greater than those of his peers in this desolate place. In those first few days, he uncomplainingly went through the rigmarole of finding a bowl and spoon, of learning his work detail, of appearing at the predawn roll call promptly; and his strength was noted.
A week later, three SS officers and a dog attached to a metal chain arrived at his hut and pointed at him and two others. “You three—come with us.”
They were escorted out of the barracks and through the camp to a truck, in which they and a dozen other prisoners drove less than two miles from Auschwitz to Birkenau. Leonid was then led into a barracks where he met a Jew who was not dressed in stripes but in normal trousers, vest, and shoes.
“Pick something out,” said the Jewish Kapo—a man named Stitz who wore curly black hair—after he led Leonid and two of his companions into a room overflowing with garments.
Spektor came to a sudden halt in his story. He didn’t say a word as the tears began welling up in his one good eye. When he finally spoke again, his voice was so soft that Rabbi Sokolow could barely hear him.
“When I was dressed, Stitz unveiled another indulgence: a flask of vodka and four shot glasses.”
For a moment, Leonid and his two confederates were not sure what to say, but Stitz just handed each of them the glass and raised it high.
“You are hereby geheimnisträger”—keepers of secrets.
Leonid didn’t have the faintest idea what the man was talking about, but nonetheless all four sanctified the declaration by knocking back their glasses. He was led out of the barracks to a large, rambling farmhouse surrounded by birch trees where two Germans stood guard. Leonid and his compatriots descended a short flight of stairs where Stitz stopped in front of an enormous door that was bolted shut.
“Don’t lose your wits,” Stitz warned. “You won’t like what you see. But you won’t be able to unsee it. And, just so you know, if you kick up a fuss that will be the end of you.”
Gas masks were handed to Leonid and the three others, which they strapped on without questions, and the door was flung open to reveal the full extent of the annihilation.
Words failed Leonid. Imagination failed him. His legs might have failed him, too, if one of the SS officers behind him hadn’t barked for him to hurry up and get on with it, poking him with the barrel of his rifle.
It was akin to opening the door to the lair of a lunatic who murdered for pleasure and kept demented trophies of his kills; he had stumbled into an obscenity that was no longer the work of human beings. The dead numbered in the hundreds, maybe more. They were naked, and most of their faces had turned purple from suffocation. But they were also lifelike, indicating the abomination had been committed only a few minutes earlier. (Which was indeed the case.) They were frozen in poses that ranged from wailing grief to hysteria. In the panic after the poison gas was dropped into the chamber, several victims had broken nails and chipped teeth, clawing at the locked door. Included in their number were countless children, many of whom had been trampled as their elders flailed about in hopeless agony. But it wasn’t just children who had been crushed; the strong had tried to climb their way to the vents at the top of the chamber, in the wild chance of reaching uncontaminated air, and they had done it at the expense of the weak. Pools of blood had collected on the floor and been smeared on the walls. Also on the floor and walls were feces from those who had befouled themselves in their final moments of torment.
“Cut off the hair of the dead,” Stitz ordered. Leonid and one of the other newbies were presented instruments closer to hedge-clippers than scissors.
“You,” Stitz said, pointing to a third. “After they finish taking the hair, you look in their mouths for gold.” The prisoner was handed a pair of pliers. “Another crew will be here in a few minutes to start moving the bodies to the crematorium.”
Back in Kreskol, neither Spektor nor the Rabbi spoke.
In the next room, Rabbi Sokolow’s young son, Anschel, and his best friend, Meir Katznelson, had situated themselves in the dark, under the sofa, and quietly listened to everything with rapt attention. But after these last words were spoken, Meir cried out.
As soon as he heard young Katznelson, Spektor turned red. The Rabbi apologized to his guest and sent the boys immediately to bed. But even as they were on their way out, the boys could see that the stranger looked chagrined; as if he had second thoughts about revealing so much of himself.
They sat in Anschel’s room for a long time before either boy said anything.
“Why do you suppose they cut off everybody’s hair?” Anschel finally asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe they sold it.”
Which sounded like a strange explanation.
“Who would buy human hair?”
Meir shrugged.
And the boys spent the week raising questions to each other about the stranger’s grisly yarn. (They were circumspect enough not to mention it to the other boys.) How did Spektor free himself from such a hellish place? What was the story behind the tattoo? How did he lose the eye? But even as they raised these questions, they did so with utter faith in everything they had heard.
Anschel’s father had greater doubts—at least at first. Neither the Persians, nor the Greeks, nor the Romans, nor the Spanish, nor the Cossacks had ever conjured up such insanity. It seemed impossible that it could happen in modern times, a few miles away. The Rabbi wondered if the man was out of his mind and should be sent packing, post haste.
But like his son, Rabbi Sokolow sensed the anguish and sincerity in Spektor’s voice. It made him feel protective.
After the two boys had been chased out of earshot, Sokolow listened to the brief afterword: a liberation by the Soviets; a Displaced Persons camp; an endless walk back in the direction of his hometown of Bruskevo, which was how he found himself in Kreskol.
“But you can’t go back to Bruskevo,” Rabbi Sokolow said. “If what you’re saying is true, there are no Jews left in your village.”
It was a somber pronouncement. All the more poignant because Spektor—who was so detached and matter-of-fact in his retelling—looked shocked; as if this transparent truth had never been considered.
“Rabbi,” he eventually said in a soft, pleading voice that he didn’t raise lest it crack, “for more than five years I fell asleep dreaming about Bruskevo. That was all I ever wished for. That I could return home.”
Neither man said anything for a long time.
“I suppose I can go to America,” Spektor finally said.
“That’s not a bad idea,” Sokolow replied. “Who wouldn’t want to see America? I’ve always believed it’s a second chance; an opportunity to begin again.”
However, there was something unstated in Sokolow’s pronouncement—as if he understood that the chance to start anew was not what
Spektor was after. Rather, he was aiming to pick up in the middle.
“Or you could stay here,” Rabbi Sokolow suggested. “Nobody would kick you out. And there are no enemies of the Jews here. No Germans. Not even any Poles—not for years and years.”
Spektor smiled.
“It’s a very nice town, of course,” Spektor said. “But it’s not home.”
The Rabbi nodded.
“Well,” Sokolow quickly added, “you should stay tonight at least.”
“Naturally.”
“There’s plenty of space in the prayer house.”
Spektor nodded.
“And, just to be clear, you shouldn’t feel the need to run off right away. There’s no real hurry, is there? You can stay a few days. Rest. And then figure out the next leg of your journey.”
In the succeeding weeks, it was never stated explicitly that Leonid Spektor would relocate permanently. He just did.
A space was made for him in the prayer house that he could use indefinitely. Funds were drawn from the synagogue treasury to buy the poor man some decent clothes. When Sokolow learned how well schooled he was in Aramaic, he let him teach the eleven-year-olds.
And while a general lack of piety prevented the more respectable citizens of Kreskol from getting too close to Spektor, the same could not be said of Herschel Sokolow, who not only felt protective of him, but also grew to love and admire him. He had, in the Rebbe’s eyes, the wisdom that comes from torment.
Rabbi Sokolow wasn’t such a fool as to believe that there was something ennobling about pain and suffering. (That was a theory for the goyim.) But nobody could deny that he had confronted and survived things that no one else in Kreskol ever had. This humbled the Rabbi in Spektor’s presence. The last thing he felt entitled to do was lecture or scold this ghost who had taken up residence in Kreskol.
After his meeting with the disgruntled mothers, Sokolow found himself much busier than he had been in weeks. There had been a long simmering dispute before the Beit Din between Steinmitz (the dairy farmer) and Lowenstein (the grain farmer) about where Steinmitz’s cows could permissibly graze. The Rabbi decided that the matter deserved his immediate attention.