by Max Gross
“I sometimes think I’m the only one who’s looking at the situation as it now stands,” he said when the rest had said their piece. “This isn’t a matter of following the laws of Poland. It is a matter of preserving Jewish law. And I say that any man or woman who feeds or clothes or aids one of these gentiles is aiding and abetting their blasphemy. As far as I’m concerned, any Jew who cooperates is an apikoros. Their meat, bread, and cheese are as unclean as a sausage!”
“What if we issued a warning first?” Rabbi Sokolow proposed. “Why do we have to go straight to the biggest and most destructive arrow in our quiver? A herem against hundreds of men and women? And their children? For just listening to the gentile authorities? I’m not saying we should do nothing. We should warn everybody about the dangers and temptations of gentile society. Maybe we can appeal to the gentiles to delay the exchange and give everybody a chance to think about it.”
“You just said we should do nothing,” Katznelson said flatly.
“No, no,” Rabbi Sokolow said, looking more and more alarmed by the implicit provocation coming from his once confederate. “I never said that.”
“When we sat down,” Katznelson said. “The first thing you said was that there was nothing that could be done. Our fate was sealed.”
“I didn’t mean we should do nothing. I even said that we all had to behave like the best upstanding Jews we could. I meant that whatever we did would have very little effect.”
“You said what you said.”
“Maybe I misspoke,” Sokolow conceded. “Yes, you are right. This is all very troubling, Meir. And, yes, we must act. But I think you’re taking it too far. A warning is better than excommunication.”
“The Poles aren’t going to delay this exchange by so much as an hour,” Rabbi Katznelson stated. “We either accept the gentiles and what they do to this town, or this is the time to take our stand.”
And as the other members of the beit din countered Katznelson, rather than disabusing him of these ludicrous ideas their opposition only calcified them; he believed that he was the only one with enough courage to stand behind the path of virtue.
“All of this chatter is beside the point,” Katznelson finally declared. “Either you think the gentile law is dangerous, or you do not. Either you think it will lead to a violation of the higher law, or you do not. I think it’s dangerous, and I don’t think we should restrain ourselves in fighting it.”
He looked past all his other challengers, and rested his eyes on the figure of Rabbi Sokolow. Their long-standing friendship was not lost on anyone in the room. Sokolow merely turned away and looked down into his beard.
No edicts were issued that night. No warnings would be forthcoming. No directives that pious Kreskolites should resist these monetary changes were given. The beit din did not dissolve into two camps, each accusing the other of apostasy. At least not presently. The meeting ended with future plans more or less unchanged.
But some other form of sorcery took place that evening that would become apparent in the coming days.
13
Disquiet
Children are far stricter adherents to the lines of seniority than adults, and because Meir Katznelson was six months older, he was the dominant partner in his friendship with Anschel Sokolow in its earliest mold.
Being of lesser status did not diminish Anschel’s affection and admiration for the wise Meir. He absorbed every lesson his friend had to teach. And, after they listened to Leonid Spektor speak about World War II, it was Meir who understood that they heard something more consequential than a simple ghost story, and made sure it was an important topic of conversation between the two boys.
“I had a dream last night that I was in the woods hiding from the Germans,” Meir told his friend weeks after Leonid Spektor had arrived in Kreskol.
Anschel considered this.
“That’s odd.”
“You haven’t had bad dreams since we heard that?”
“No.”
But, as if his friend were stage-managing his unconscious mind, the next evening Anschel had one such vision. He dreamed that Leonid Spektor was directing him to dig a tunnel out of Kreskol—but the hole kept going straight down. As they got closer to the center of the earth everything grew hotter, like he was approaching the fires of hell. Shortly before they reached bottom, a mysterious figure—covered in grime and filth, who had been bloodied within an inch of his life—appeared tucked into a tunnel and begged Anschel to turn around and go back the way he came. (In the elusive way that dreams follow their own logic, Anschel implicitly understood that this half-dead character was an angel.)
Meir and Anschel were among Spektor’s most loyal listeners after he opted to stay in town and began telling his stories of the macabre to the yeshiva boys. But they instinctively kept to themselves what they had heard that night underneath the Sokolow sofa.
“How much of that do you think is true?” Anschel asked one afternoon as they walked home from cheder after hearing about a boy who had the fat of his stomach turned into bars of soap by a sinister wizard with a snappy mustache.
“All of it.”
But that couldn’t be the case. Spektor spoke of warlocks and witches and other creatures of the supernatural that the boys were old enough to know were likely imaginary.
“They’re disguises,” Meir surmised. “They’re real stories, but he’s dressing them up as fairy tales.”
Other questions arose; the boys wondered what had happened to the German perpetrators of the crimes he originally spoke of—but they didn’t have the nerve to ask Spektor to sort the truth from fiction. (They missed the part Spektor related to Herschel Sokolow after they had been sent to bed where the Russian army liberated the camp.)
While Anschel was the less troubled of the two, he would nevertheless stare out into the woods on Shabbat afternoon and wonder what nightmares lurked in the forest before rushing back home and under the covers.
One evening, Anschel asked his father if the one-eyed man’s story was really true.
“I’m not sure,” Herschel Sokolow said. “But I think so.”
“Should we tell the rest of Kreskol about this?”
Herschel pondered the question.
“No.”
“Why?”
Herschel ran a hand through his beard—a habit his son would mimic many years later when he was considering a question he wasn’t fully sure how to answer.
“Panic,” Herschel finally answered. If war and mass murder had recently scorched the rest of Poland, Herschel continued, telling everybody about it could instigate village-wide hysteria. So far, none of this business had touched them—so why worry everybody?
Maybe there’s a reason to worry, Anschel thought. Maybe we should get busy coming up with the escape plan. Maybe involving the town’s smartest minds would be the best way to arrive at a solution. Maybe we were wasting valuable time.
But saying something like that felt like a challenge, and Anschel Sokolow respected his father too much to press the matter.
“The war is over,” Herschel Sokolow assured his son. “That was how Spektor managed to get away. The Germans fled. The Russians have taken their place. You don’t really need to be anxious.”
Meir’s fears were not allayed when Anschel related this to him.
“So, the Russians came,” Meir repeated.
“That’s what my father said.”
“Are the Russians any better?”
Truly, every piece of history they had been taught about their neighbors to the east indicated that the Russians were drunken, cutthroat maniacs with a particular distaste for Jews.
“And I suppose when all the murderers fled,” Meir added, “their helpers melted away with them?” Like, say, the blond witch with the chipped tooth only too willing to abet the slaughter.
The urgency of these questions might have faded over time, but the fixation was kept alive sitting at Leonid Spektor’s feet and faithfully taking in all he said—until
one day Spektor announced there would be no more stories. Not now, not ever. He gave no explanation for the precipitous reversal.
As Spektor’s narratives came to a halt, so did Anschel’s attention to the matter. He began to think that the kidnapping, mass murder, and slavery Spektor spoke of was not the immediate peril the first accounts seemed to imply. He even began to wonder if, in fact, Leonid Spektor was utterly meshuggenah* and had invented the whole story.
However, the same stories left footprints in Meir’s personality that endured for the rest of his life.
Years later (decades later) Meir Katznelson never quite stopped thinking about Leonid Spektor. Even after the absence of any corroborating evidence might have corroded his faith. Even as Spektor grew laconic with age and withdrawn from his pupils and former pupils. Even when the world outside Kreskol remained as unknowable and foreign as the surface of the moon, and Meir—like a lot of the residents of Kreskol—sometimes forgot it even existed. Even after marriage and a child came to supersede the larger, ethereal questions raised by his brief association with Leonid Spektor. Even after the passions of his friendship with Anschel Sokolow cooled, and he began to notice the personal and intellectual flaws in Herschel Sokolow’s heir apparent.
Then one day Rajmund Sikorski plopped down in Kreskol, passed around the photos of the war and the concentration camps, and Katznelson felt a rising sense of shock; as if a shameful secret about himself had suddenly been revealed.
There was the photo of the dead sprawled out by the hundreds in a ravine. There were photos of prisoners crammed on top of one another in the concentration camp bunks. One photo showed a terrified little boy with his hands up in the air in surrender—a pair of German soldiers stood casually cradling their rifles in their arms, unimpressed by his fear. Looking at that photograph, Meir Katznelson’s emotions so overwhelmed him that he was fearful he would break into tears. He looked up at Sokolow, who appeared sheepish.
Katznelson said little during the next few days to dampen the general good mood in Kreskol. The war and what it all meant wasn’t much of a concern for anybody except Meir. An announcement about it was made after services the next Shabbat: There had been a war, Rabbi Sokolow said. It was cataclysmic. Most of the Jews of Europe perished. But he didn’t say much more and nobody seemed very interested in it. Rather, there was a much more overwhelming spirit of wonder among the Kreskolites. Flight was what the populace wanted to talk about. Photography was what the people wanted to talk about. The state of Israel was what the people wanted to talk about.
But as the first dizzying days after rediscovery receded, the long-buried dread of Meir Katznelson’s youth was exhumed and soon it was the only thought on his mind.
“What’s wrong with you, husband?” Temerl Katznelson asked one night months after the helicopter landed, as he tossed and turned in his bed.
“Nothing.”
Temerl sat upright and stared at the dark outline of her husband.
After a few moments, Katznelson finally lit a candle, sat up in his dressing gown, and proceeded to tell her he was thinking about what Sokolow had told Kreskol about World War II.
“But he didn’t tell it right,” Katznelson said. “He glossed over the worst of it.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“I heard the real story from a witness.”
Katznelson proceeded to recount the foggy, misty memory of the night more than seven decades earlier, which upended his wife’s calm.
“Leonid Spektor was in the middle of all that?” she said when he finished.
Temerl was several years younger than her husband and not quite old enough to hear Spektor’s after-school tales, even secondhand. Spektor was merely the town’s one-eyed, childless oddball, confined to Kreskol’s outskirts. He was slowly decaying by the time Temerl paid him any attention, limping through the marketplace in search of sustenance. It seemed impossible that this small, insignificant man should have served as witness to such towering evil.
“Are you going to tell the people of Kreskol about this?” Temerl asked.
“I’m not sure,” Katznelson answered. “Maybe.”
“There is no maybe about it,” Temerl declared. “This is important. The rest of the Jews were exterminated! We must know about it!”
Katznelson was taken aback by his wife’s moral clarity and it made him feel ashamed—almost as if he were helping to cover up the great crime.
“Yes, you’re right.”
However, the question of how to inform the citizenry of Kreskol about this indisputably critical—but indisputably long ago—calamity was not as simple as one might think.
Kreskol had no printing press and Meir Katznelson had no congregation for his sermon.
He thought of calling together all the schoolteachers and instructing them to include the story of the Holocaust in their lessons. That way, the next generation would at least have it foremost in their minds. But should the youth really know before their parents? What would the parents say when asked the inevitable questions?
He wondered if he should call a town meeting and relate everything he knew. But how much, truly, did he know? While Leonid’s descriptions of the gas chambers and the bloodthirsty Huns were seared in Meir’s brain, the prologue to this—Versailles and the Anschluss and the September campaign—was much fainter. He had gleaned the terms “Hitler” and “Nazis” from Rajmund Sikorski, who had spent less than twenty minutes of his initial visit outlining the political history of the tragedy.
The first thing to do, Katznelson decided, was to find out what happened.
“I want to know more about the Holocaust,” Katznelson told Rabbi Sokolow. (This was many months before their impasse over the currency exchange.)
Rabbi Sokolow wasn’t sure how he could even accommodate such a request.
“Ask Sikorski for some books about it,” Katznelson volunteered. “And make sure they’re in Yiddish.”
“All right.”
But Katznelson wasn’t finished.
“I think the whole town should know about it. Really know about it. I don’t know why we didn’t tell the town everything.”
Rabbi Sokolow ran his fingers through his beard.
“What do you mean by ‘everything’?” Sokolow finally asked.
“Everything. What Leonid Spektor told us.”
Sokolow hadn’t spoken the name Leonid Spektor in nearly two decades. Even when the man had died and Sokolow delivered the hesped* he hadn’t breathed a word of Spektor’s story. He merely said that this grizzled, intelligent stranger had made his home in Kreskol and Spektor was “greatly concerned with the preservation of Kreskol.” It was a peculiar addition—but nobody thought to question it at the time.
“I don’t know if it will make sense,” Sokolow finally said.
“That’s exactly why I want to find out more,” Katznelson replied. “We need to tell the whole story.”
A few weeks later, Sikorski related the disappointing (but not unexpected) news that there wasn’t enough Yiddish readership to support the translation of the large scholarly tomes of Holocaust history such as The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich or The War Against the Jews. However, there were some memoirs and books written originally in Yiddish. Plus, shorter books that had been translated fifty or sixty years ago, when there was still a secular Yiddish-speaking population. By way of example, Sikorski presented Sokolow with Dos Togbukh fun Ana Frank.**
“Sikorski says he’s going to bring more as he finds them,” Sokolow told Katznelson.
Sikorski was true to his word; he brought lithographs about the destruction of Warsaw; small accounts of life in the Lodz Ghetto; memoirs of those who had escaped from Poland to Shanghai; and a 346-page examination of German war crimes by a Lord Edward Frederick Langley Russell of Liverpool, that had been rendered into Yiddish as Di Baytsh Fun Haknkrayts.*
Katznelson retreated to his house with these histories and slowly grew more consumed with the tragedy. The months passed, but
he didn’t leave his house. He merely sat and read, wasting away to the point that Temerl could see the outline of his vertebrae as he lay on his side.
The road into Kreskol was finished, and Katznelson didn’t care. Tourists started coming into town, and Katznelson merely did his best to avoid meeting their eyes. They were, after all, gentiles. Or so he assumed. He hadn’t realized just what gentiles were capable of. It angered him. It frightened him. It depressed him.
And as the good people of Kreskol grew more comfortable with the promise of their future place in Poland, Katznelson grew more resolved to make a stink.
When Rabbi Sokolow called him and the rest of the elders of the beit din to a meeting to discuss what would happen with the new currency exchange, from the deepest depths of his soul, Katznelson felt a helpless, bottomless howl of rage. This would not stand. Never. Never. Never.
His fellow rabbis looked shocked by his invective, but Katznelson was long past caring. His old friend Anschel looked genuinely hurt by the rawness of his anger. He didn’t mind one little tick. When the meeting was over, with the conviction of Jeremiah, Katznelson marched home, picked up a sheepskin scroll and a goose-feather quill, and wrote in Yiddish all that he knew about the Holocaust. He began thus:
To the citizens of the lost shtetl of Kreskol, this is the story of Leonid Spektor and all he endured in the conflict known as World War II. His account was known to me and a few others—but out of respect for his wishes not to disseminate his story, we kept it secret. However, I have come to believe everyone who is living in Kreskol should know it. We should know what this man who lived among us endured. We should know how widespread was the tragedy of World War II. We should know exactly what we were spared. We should wonder why we were fortunate and others were not. And all of us—from the righteous to the venal—should feel guilty!
It was a peculiar way to begin such a document—particularly if its purpose was to inform. But it was a good way to draw notice. It certainly captured the attention of those who arrived in synagogue the next morning after Katznelson had hammered the scroll to the door. A small crowd formed around the document—which was some three thousand words long—and patiently read about gas chambers and the burnings of bodies and the figure of six million of their fellow Jews (along with millions more of their fellow human beings) who had been incinerated—none of which had been reported in more than a curtailed, piecemeal way before.