by Max Gross
The crowd stood around the synagogue’s door for hours. Not everybody could get close enough to read it at once. But all were curious. And over the course of the day, as each man finished the document, they peeled away and morosely went off to their plows or stalls, not bothering to pray. Katznelson’s ominous warning ended on the following note:
I ask you—how could anyone possibly believe anything the Poles say? How can any among us put faith in this government, or any other? History has shown us that we were led to slaughter by the very kind of people who are now proposing to lead us again to salvation. Are we really so trusting and foolish? We cannot be destroyed a second time. We cannot succumb to their charms. Let us remain the way we were. Boycott the exchange!
I never completely understood the connection between the exchange and the Holocaust. But, I suppose, Katznelson saw in the story of the Holocaust a vision of the future that Kreskol narrowly avoided. He saw all the great advances of technology that had been honed and perfected in the service of mankind’s most primitive and horrific instincts.
Now the future was calling. The exchange was Poland’s attempt to reroute Kreskol into its proper place, whether we liked it or not. Katznelson shuddered at the prospect.
And while the people of Kreskol might have been avoiding the questions of the Holocaust for the many months since our rediscovery, this new manifesto meant that no one could ignore it.
It got around town that Katznelson had been studying the Holocaust, and that he was tutoring townsfolk about it in private. Men, women, and the elderly sought him out over the next few days and asked him about it.
Many were sickened by what they heard. A dark cloud formed over the town and everything we had experienced in recent months. Suddenly vital questions arose such as why we should have been so fortunate to have been spared when so many good towns were thrown into the chasm. What did such evil say about the nature of mankind? Why did this happen to the Jews? There were many more.
Plenty of other Kreskolites were indifferent. After all, it had happened many, many years ago. Life moved on. Similar things had happened during the Babylonian conquest, the Roman conquest, the crusades . . .
“Not like this,” Katznelson jabbed back. “It was nothing like this. This was a singular moment in history.”
“Regardless,” said Landz Bronfman, “what does it have to do with the currency exchange?”
Katznelson could not contain his rage.
“It has everything to do with it!”
14
Schism
The first inkling of the extent of the damage Katznelson had done to the town and the pending currency exchange came from a young boy with brownish blond sidelocks who passed Rabbi Gluck on the street two days before the ribbon cutting. “Is it true that the money that we’re going to get from the Poles is cursed?”
Gluck was, at first, too surprised by the question to take it seriously.
“What a lot of nonsense!” he said. “Run along.”
But throughout the ribbon-cutting ceremony a few days later, nervous mothers kept coming up to Rabbi Gluck and asking him if it was really all right to hand their money over to the exchange.
“Why wouldn’t it be?” Gluck asked.
“I hear some of the rabbis are saying that anyone who uses the new money will be punished.”
“Punished for what?”
The woman shrugged. “Transgression,” she finally offered.
“Where did you hear that?”
But the antecedent of a rumor is as elusive as the father of a bastard.
“I can assure you,” Rabbi Gluck repeated to all who asked, “it’s perfectly safe to turn over your money. Nobody is going to forbid its use.”
Even those who wanted to believe him had their doubts.
“The safest thing to do,” opined Esther Rosen, as she knitted on her veranda, “is to do nothing. Just wait.”
“Wouldn’t the safest thing be to listen to the Poles?” asked one of the wives. “So far we haven’t heard any of the rabbis say we should do otherwise. Except Katznelson.”
“Maybe the smartest thing to do is just to listen to the Poles,” Esther continued. “I’m not saying that they’re actually going to outlaw the new money. The likely outcome is that the new money works out just fine. But I’m talking about the very safest. It’s a risk. What if in six months the rabbis change their minds and say that whoever touched this new money is a sinner?”
One young man, Koppel Nagel, went to the marketplace on the day after Tisha B’Av, stood on a sack of flour, and began sermonizing.
“Hear ye, hear ye, good people of Kreskol,” Koppel began. “Everybody knows that tomorrow the exchanges are to open. We’ve been promised thirty-eight new zlotys for every old zloty. It sounds like a fair trade—but I, for one, am not going to give them a single groschen. They’re only doing this to make it easier for more gentiles to come into town—not to make life easier on us. I say, things are good enough! I say, boycott the exchange!”
This soliloquy might have been less effective in the mouth of an indifferent speaker, but Koppel Nagel had a previously unrealized genius at oratory. People all around the marketplace stopped what they were doing and spontaneously broke into applause.
Early the morning after the ribbon-cutting ceremony a truck arrived from Smolskie carrying Kreskol’s first shipment of mail.
Each family got the same three pieces: a four-page letter (written in Polish and Yiddish) describing the currency exchange; a postcard from the Szyszki administrative and civil affairs bureau (also in both languages) urging all the townspeople to visit the Poczta for the issuance of a photo ID; finally, an ungrammatical letter from an Israeli developer who wanted to erect a hotel next door to the Poczta.
Berel walked his new staff through the forms behind the front desk at the Poczta. “This is for passports,” Berel said. “This is for photo ID. This is for voter registration. This is the form for money orders. This is for registered mail . . .” (Being that there was no municipal building in Kreskol yet, all parties agreed that voting and passport matters should be handled out of the Poczta until this was remedied.)
Berel demonstrated how to use the scale; how to print out bar codes using the Poczta equipment; where the stash of stamps would be kept; how to lock up the building every night and input the security code; how to restock the toilet paper in the bathroom; where the fluorescent lights were kept and how to change them; how to operate the generator in the basement that would be used until the electrical grid was functional.
An armored truck, two representatives of the Ministry of Finance, and five armed guards appeared at the Poczta at six o’clock on the appointed morning of the money exchange.
Berel and the rest of the postal employees were there to greet these Poles.
“Be prepared for a very busy day,” said one of the men from the Ministry of Finance, shaking Berel’s hand. “Now where should we set up?”
Berel led the ensemble into the back room of the Poczta. The guards hauled three oilcloth sacks of cash to a wooden table, where the packs of 10-, 20-, 50-, and 100-zloty notes were stacked on top of one another and counted.
“Verify,” one of the treasurers said to Berel. “I have counted one hundred ten-zloty notes, for one thousand zlotys.”
Berel nodded. “I verify.”
The treasurer went on to the 20-zloty notes, and continued on—counting and verifying—until opening.
One guard stood near all the money in the back room. Another stood behind the counter with the two treasurers. A third one stood in the middle of the waiting area, to maintain order among the crowds that were expected. A fourth was stationed at the door. A fifth waited by the armored truck.
When the doors of the Poczta finally swung open, about half a dozen Kreskolites were waiting. All but one were men.
The highest amount changed was by Zemel Reiss, who brought in 348 zlotys in old coins, leaving with the gargantuan sum of 13,154 zlotys and 40 groschen.
A receipt was written up in Polish and Yiddish, which Berel signed.
“I feel like a millionaire.” Zemel laughed as he stuffed the stacks of hundreds and fifties into his trouser pockets, his coat, and his socks.
“Be careful with it,” Itcha advised.
But the number of people who came into the Poczta over the course of the afternoon was worryingly small.
The unofficial census that had been conducted after Berel had mapped all of Kreskol put the population at 1,793, give or take. It was estimated that each household consisted of six people: an average of three children, two parents, and some other older relative—be it a grandparent or an unmarried aunt. There were just over three hundred residences in town, and another hundred or so commercial properties.
But only thirty people showed up over the course of the day to change money.
“This is not quite as big a disaster as it seems,” said one of the treasurers at 5 p.m., when he started packing up for the day. “We can expect only one person per household will change money. What would be the point of husband, wife, nana, and junior coming to the exchange? But this is still not good. We should have hit a much higher target than two percent of the population.”
“Do we have a backup plan?” asked Berel.
“If we do, nobody’s told me about it.”
The next day eighteen Kreskolites showed up—even after Berel sent Itcha out into the marketplace to tell everyone he saw that the currency exchange was open for business and there was no line to get through. Nobody cared. Those who did show up looked pained—as if they weren’t entirely sure they were doing the right thing. (One such Kreskolite changed his mind just as the treasurer began filling out the receipt, snatched his coins up, and strode out the door without saying a word to anybody.)
This was alarming enough that Rajmund Sikorski came to town to observe the next day.
“We mustn’t panic,” Mr. Sikorski said as he stood in the quiet of the Poczta and examined the receipts. “There will probably be a spike of interest as the deadline for closing the exchange approaches.”
Which, while not alleviating anybody’s worries, sounded like a reasonable prediction.
“However, I’m slightly more worried that some of the wealthier people in town have not come in yet,” Mr. Sikorski added. (Berel was impressed that his gentile counterpart remembered the moneyed names of our town, like Yechel Mazer and Abushula Dorfman.) “If they don’t go along with this, then it’ll be a doomed effort.”
Mr. Sikorski continued to study the receipts.
“And why the hell isn’t Rabbi Gluck or Rabbi Shlussel on this list?” Sikorski asked Berel, as if he had personally forgotten to rouse them out of bed. “They should have been here on the first day. They’re our only allies in this. What are they waiting for?”
And so, with little better to do, Berel and Sikorski found Rabbi Gluck in his wood shop and asked him why he hadn’t visited the exchange yet.
“What’s the rush?” Gluck asked.
“What’s the hold up?” Berel countered. “There’s not a soul there right now. Why wait until the deadline?”
Rabbi Gluck looked discomforted. “Look,” Gluck said. “I have every intention of going down to the exchange. I promise you both. But I should really be one of the very last to do it. For complicated reasons that I can’t get into.”
Sikorski tried to catch Berel’s eye without success.
“Well, at any rate, would you at least pester Yechel Mazer to come down and change his money?” Berel asked.
“Maybe.”
Rabbi Shlussel was easier to convince—even if he was the rabbi of the downtrodden, and his actions carried less weight.
“Certainly,” Shlussel said. “I’ll go this afternoon.”
As if to punctuate his complicity, Shlussel hung a sign outside the door of his store saying that he would accept only modern currency, and setting the new rates for carpets and repairs. (The new figures he posted were high enough that Reb Shlussel’s hands trembled as he nailed the sign to his door.)
But by far the most important citizen to participate in the exchange that day was Abushula Dorfman, who—when Sikorski and Berel visited him—agreed that all the talk about holding on to the old money was a lot of nonsense. He turned over more than 8,600 zlotys to the exchange. He also agreed that he would no longer accept older money in his business dealings. Given that he was one of the two largest distributors of cattle and goats in Kreskol, every merchant who heard this was suddenly a lot less persuaded by the argument that they should sit on their old coins.
The next day, more than two dozen of Kreskol’s most prominent merchants followed suit, and hung up signs in their stalls saying they would accept only modern currency.
On the last day of the exchange, a hundred families showed up with their life savings. For the first time since the exchanges started, there were lines out the door.
Reb Mazer changed his many thousands of zlotys. Rabbi Gluck’s wife, Raisa, quietly turned over the family’s modest savings. (Gluck was nowhere to be seen.) Reb Bernstein made a point of saying that he would only turn over half of his savings. (A practice that a number of families, including ones who claimed they supported the exchange, secretly did.)
Even the Rebbetzin showed up at the Poczta and wordlessly handed over the Sokolow family’s life savings.
Many of the old ladies who came with the gold coins that they had owned for as long as three quarters of a century wept as they handed them over. The hundreds—or in many cases thousands—of modern zlotys in compensation couldn’t cheer them; it was as if some great era of the past was violently dying before their eyes.
“This has nothing to do with reason,” Itcha told his boss that night as they counted up the receipts. “Everybody with any brainpower knows that this is the only sensible thing. It’s been explained well. But it doesn’t matter. I was also terrified—and I don’t even have any old money.”
Still, despite this last-minute push, only 486 people participated in the exchange (more than one member came from numerous households). A full third of the town’s families had stayed home completely—including some of the wealthy.
The day after the exchange closed for good, one-third of the weavers, cobblers, bakers, glassblowers, and farmers of Kreskol kept prices the way they were a year ago and refused to accept modern currency.
It was akin to a village-wide boycott. As the months wore on, more and more accepted trade in lieu of money; but the trades were conducted grudgingly—as if those of us who participated in the exchange had permanently soiled ourselves and were now unholy. Unholier, even, than the Poles.
Two separate Kreskols emerged. One grew wealthy. The other grew poor. The poor sneered as they walked past their neighbors. They gritted their teeth. They stopped having anything to do with any of the rabbis of the beit din (except Rabbi Katznelson, who never changed his savings) and attended smaller, more fanatical shuls.
Kreskol was never the same.
15
Brother Wiernych
Shortly before Kreskol’s story broke in the press, a farmer named Oskar Kowal realized that a transient was living in his barn.
He had been picking up signs of something amiss for weeks. First, when he would come in to milk the cows in the morning one of their udders would invariably be dry.
Second, going up to the hayloft one afternoon he discovered the bales had been rearranged. The impression of a body had taken form in the hay, with a pronounced lump where the pillow would go.
Finally, he stumbled upon a small hole that had been covered with dirt in the corner of his barn. When he kicked some of the dirt away, he found that it was filled with excrement.
Kowal asked his wife if she had noticed anything funny.
“No,” she said. But a few hours later when her husband came in from the fields she revised her answer. “You know something. There have been a few things.”
“Like what?”
The wife, Zuzanna, wrinkle
d her brow as she considered the question.
“Food has been disappearing from the refrigerator,” she said. “And the cupboards.”
Whoever the thief was, he had been notably restrained. One night, Zuzanna had put away eight leftover pierogis—there were three the next night. Cakes and loaves of bread would be slimmer than when they had initially been put away. She would open a bag of pretzels and a day later there would only be crumbs left.
It was never enough to call attention to itself, but when considered in its entirety the evidence looked unmistakable.
In the Kowals’ private little island of civilization—miles and miles from the nearest town and, unbeknownst to these humble farmers, roughly halfway between Smolskie and Kreskol—critters from the forest would occasionally pierce the house’s varied protections and help themselves to whatever was in the cupboards. But they did so without stealth. A trail of incriminating scraps followed them out the door, as if to inform the Kowals that they were vulnerable.
This, however, looked very different.
Kowal went for a walk in the surrounding woods just before dusk, looking for signs of a vagrant. His son, Jakub, stayed in the hayloft with the family hunting rifle, just in case.
A few hundred feet into the woods Kowal uncovered a small, makeshift firepit. Near the pit was a bag filled with clothes and a blanket. A few yards away were more signs of an ad hoc commode that had also been covered with dirt, much like the one in the barn. Among the refuse was the paper wrapper for the Bursztyn cheese that the Kowals ate regularly.
“Did you see anything?” Kowal asked his son when he returned to the hayloft.
“I didn’t see—I heard,” Jakub said. “Somebody prowling around. But the moment they heard me they turned around and fled.”