The Legacy

by Melanie Phillips

She shook her head slowly, from side to side, as if trying to shake out of it some intolerable memory.

  “The Ajzensztejns. A lovely family. Boruch, he was a tailor, and Symma, his wife. We never had enough to eat, but however little they had they would give us: some fresh eggs, half a loaf of bread, a few carrots or onions.

  “Boruch would mend our clothes. He made a little brown jacket for Joszef and a cap from the leavings of the material. He would sit at his sewing machine every day, whirring away. We would sit and watch him, Joszef and I; and he told us stories, such stories, about the spirit world and about the golem and the dybbuk, you know, how someone is taken over by someone else’s soul and what comes out of their mouth is that soul’s voice? And he would do the dybbuk’s voices and I would shriek with terror.

  “I would watch Symma as she cooked, my God what with, none of us had enough to eat, but somehow she managed to produce on a Friday such a chicken soup I can still smell, and the challah bread she baked, the special Friday night loaves, the fragrance of that bread. And she showed me all the laws they had to keep, the separate dishes for meat and dairy, how when she made her dough for the Friday loaves she would reserve a piece in honor of the Almighty.”

  So that was how Kuczynski knew so much, he thought.

  “At home, it was so very different. Religion to us was a cold and drafty church once a week, plaster statues of the Virgin that were said to weep—however long and hard I stared I never saw such a thing. And all these terrible warnings about hell and damnation, sin and guilt. Everything was guilt. So miserable. So grim. But Boruch and Symma’s house was full of such joy and laughter. Their religion, their God, was in every single thing they did, all the ordinary, routine, everyday things were somehow made special, had a kind of glow that somehow raised that whole family above the harshness of the lives we all led.”

  “And did your brother feel the same way?”

  She fell silent, and a shadow seemed to fall across her face. Family. She had said family. Yet she had made no mention of the daughter, the girl whom Joszef had loved and who had loved him.

  “Our parents were good Catholics. They went to confession every week, they prayed to the Virgin, they looked up to the priest. Father Pawlicki. The Jews were our neighbors and our friends. But Father Pawlicki preached that the Jews had killed Christ and were damned for all eternity. They were the people of the devil.

  “Our father would sometimes make remarks about how the Jews were not to be trusted, how they might appear on the surface to be like us but how they were always scheming to steal all our money. Joszef was very close to our father. He would sit listening to Boruch’s stories as he sat at his treadle; but then afterwards he would make sneering remarks about the Ajzensztejns, about their peculiar ways and how they weren’t really like us at all. Of course, there was another reason why my brother kept going there…”

  She checked herself. Russell slowly wiped his hands on his trousers.

  “When the Communists came, and they were so hated, people said a lot of them were Jews and that the Jews of our town were supporting them. This was true, but also not true. Plenty of Jews, pious Jews like the Ajzensztejns, knew the Communists were not their friends. But there were bad feelings against the Jews. There was a tension.

  “It wasn’t just because of the Communists. Before the war—well, before the Nazis and the Cossacks made their deal—there was violence against the Jews in our area. Savage. A Jewish woman was killed; a few days later someone in a neighboring town was shot to death. Rumors flew around that the Jews had taken revenge. In an instant there was a mob ready to commit murder. The Jews would have been set upon then and there, but the rabbi went to the priests and begged them to do something. God help me, the priests could have stopped it, all of it, all this butchery of the Jews. Because in our area this thing was done not by Communists, not by Nazis, but by Poles.”

  Russell hardly dared breathe. But he felt confused. The Jews had been their friends, she said, in and out of each other’s houses. Yet the Poles had repeatedly attacked them. How could this be?

  She paused again, apparently lost in a reverie. She was back in Poland, reliving whatever it was she had been through.

  “An informer gave my father away to the Soviets. This we knew. Joszef said the informer was a Jew. Was that true? We never knew. But from that moment, Joszef’s attitude changed. Now he was openly hostile towards the Jews. And there was a cynical edge to him. Harder.

  “It troubled me, he’d always been a bit on the wild side, but it was not uppermost in my mind. After all, we were now both fugitives from the Russians, living with the partisans in the forest.

  “But I couldn’t understand why suddenly we were able to go back home. The Cosssacks were rounding up partisans. Yet we could come out of hiding. The danger to us seemed to have disappeared. But why?

  “After we went back, Joszef seemed different again. He seemed, I don’t know, to have grown a sense of self-importance. He strutted, that’s the only way I can put it. I was nervous; partisans were being discovered and picked off, shot or transported. But no one touched us.

  “You know, when something is really, really bad, so bad it will break your heart, you so much don’t want to believe it you’ll swallow anything.

  “One day a Cossack came to our house. I was terrified, but he sat with Joszef. My brother told me to bring them both tea. When I brought it to them they were talking quietly together. As if they knew each other. And then, all of a sudden, I understood. Everything became very clear. I was shocked, I can’t tell you how I felt. I said to him, how can you do this, how can you possibly do such a thing? These are our comrades, we are all fighting for the same cause. But he just sneered at me, told me not to be so stupid. I saw then he had become very cruel.”

  Russell heard again Kuczynski’s voice, heard him falter. Yes, he thought, his suspicion had been correct. Kuczynski had been a Russian informer. He had betrayed the Polish partisans to the Russian invaders. Just as someone had betrayed his own family to them.

  She slowly raised her cup to her lips again. When she spoke again, she wouldn’t meet his eyes.

  “You have to understand, in those times everyone was out for himself. Just to survive.”

  Apart, of course, from the resistance members Kuczynski had betrayed, Russell thought.

  Now she became agitated. Her breathing became more rapid and the knuckles of her fingers, twisted together, turned white. Her voice became quieter. Imperceptibly, Russell leaned forward in his chair.

  “The Ajzensztejns had a daughter. Blume. Just the one: they thought they couldn’t have any children and then she was born to them late. A miracle child.

  “Blume was my friend. She was extraordinary, an exotic creature to me. One in a million. She was very lovely. Full of fun and gaiety, even in those times. Witty: her intelligence just shone through. And gifted: she played the violin, melodies of such sadness and sweetness I had never heard. And Boruch and Symma would sing as she played, songs of such longing. I didn’t understand many of the words, but they touched me in my heart.

  “My brother…he was very attracted to Blume. Of course she wouldn’t look at him. She was a proud Jewish girl. She told me she was afraid of him. The way he looked at her, it made her very uncomfortable. He was very persistent. One day he held a kitchen knife to her throat as he told her he loved her, then said he had been fooling around. Love!”

  She grimaced.

  “He had no idea what that was. Really, I think looking back he had no feelings for other people, that there was always something missing there. Even before. Anyway…”

  She swallowed several times. Now her voice was so quiet he had to strain to hear her.

  “Blume was resisting him. She was very strong, he knew he couldn’t wear her down. So…so he told her he would denounce her parents to the Soviets as partisans unless she slept with him.”

 
Again Russell was confused. “And were they? Were the Ajzensztejns partisans?’

  She waved her hand impatiently. “It was a lie. Boruch and Symma did nothing at all against the Russians, the very thought of it, they were totally outside politics. But Joszef didn’t care whether it was true or not. He assumed all the Jews were communists anyway. He said it just as a weapon to get his way with Blume.

  “Blume knew it was a lie, of course. But she was terrified of Joszef. She knew he had credibility with the Cossacks. He told her how many partisans he had helped send to the labor camps or to be shot. She thought if he denounced her parents to the Soviets they would believe him. So she gave herself up to him.”

  Russell thought of Kuczynski weeping in his living room as he had told him about Blume. Christ, he’d assumed there had been some kind of forbidden love affair. Star-crossed lovers, a Polish Romeo and Juliet; or Eliachim and Duzelina. His stomach heaved. God help him, he had even allowed himself to make a comparison with himself and Alice.

  “I was told all this only later. Afterwards.” Almost imperceptibly, Zofia rocked herself back and forwards in her distress. “Blume just seemed to disappear; I didn’t see her anywhere. Nor did I see Symma and Boruch. The invitations to their house just stopped. I asked my brother what was going on, but he just shrugged. He didn’t seem curious. I was worried the Cossacks had taken them, but he told me not to interfere in case it made us look bad. In any event, I had other things on my mind. The Soviets left and the Nazis arrived…”

  “This was 1941? When the Nazi-Soviet pact collapsed?”

  She nodded, faintly. “The Soviets were replaced by the Nazis. For the second time we were occupied by barbarians, but different ones. That June, when the Nazis marched in, they were greeted as liberators by our town.”

  “Liberators?”

  “Sure. So much suffering under the Soviets, you see.”

  “Was that how you saw them too? As liberators?”

  She looked at him steadily. Her skin was like creased parchment, but her eyes were still a deep cornflower blue.

  “You are an Englishman. You have the luxury of never having had to live under occupation, never having to work out how to survive from day to day under a cruel regime. Communism, fascism, what was the difference to us then? We died under both.”

  She closed her eyes as if weary. He waited on tenterhooks. When she spoke again, it was as if she was speaking from somewhere far away.

  “To begin with, that first day when I saw the Germans arrive, yes, yes, I felt relief. I heard the cheering of the people, and I allowed myself to dare to think, maybe, just maybe we’ll be safer now. But then that day, later that day, that very same day, I saw…I saw…”

  There was a catch in her throat. She composed herself.

  “I saw in the main square one, two, three members of the Soviet militia, the men we had so much feared; and next to them three Jews, there was the baker who had put out a table with a red cloth to welcome the Soviets when they arrived, I knew him well, and two other Jews. The six of them stood there, they’d been beaten, they were bleeding, surrounded by Germans; but in front of the Germans stood local people from the town, holding clubs, thick clubs. One of the Germans was calling out, ‘Don’t kill at once, make them suffer slowly…’ ”

  She stopped again.

  “Did you recognize any of the men doing the beating?” he asked softly. Of course, he knew already. Kuczynski had been part of that mob.

  She sat with her hand over her mouth. He himself felt transfixed by her horror, scarcely daring to breathe.

  When she resumed, it was almost as if she was talking to herself.

  “War is terrible. But this was something else. It was…incomprehensible.”

  She spread her hands, palms upright.

  “People were as if possessed. Farmers, the local carpenter, the blacksmith, the grocer. I knew them. But now it was as if I had never known them at all. People who had been neighborly, hospitable, polite—now they were transformed, worse than wild animals. There was…there was what I can only describe as a blood lust. A desire for extreme violence, a horrible excitement to crush and maim and mutilate.

  “There were no longer any boundaries, there was no reason for them to do these things. A young Jewish mother managed to jump from a train taking prisoners to the death camps, jumped with her two small children. Twenty or so partisans, the kind of people I had been with in the forest when we hid from the Soviets, they beat to death this mother and her children with sticks and clubs. Just for the pleasure of killing Jews. What had this poor girl ever done to them? Nothing. She was already a victim of the Nazis. But it was Poles who murdered her.”

  She shook her head slowly from side to side.

  “It was chaos. Poland was now under Nazi occupation, and the Nazis were now killing thousands of Poles. But the Soviets were also still killing Polish partisans, even though they were all fighting the Nazis. It made no sense…”

  Once again she seemed to be talking to herself.

  “You think you are a good person. You think there are good people and there are bad people. That’s a luxury, to be able to think like that; it’s self-indulgence. There is no good and bad, no black and white. Under that kind of pressure, people simply go mad.”

  She looked up, and in her eyes he saw such desolation he had to look away.

  “Poland had become a vortex of absolute evil. And the Polish people turned on the Jews. Over the following days, just in our part of the country, pogrom after pogrom. Thousands of Jews murdered by Polish hooligans. They went and asked the Germans, should we kill them? They actually asked them for permission to kill. Imagine.

  “The Germans were themselves beating up and killing Jews, taking away their cows and stealing their property and giving it all to the Poles. They forced the Jews to burn all their holy scrolls and books and to dance around the burning piles. The Poles would sometimes send the Germans to beat and murder the Jews. But mainly it was Polish people themselves who did these things. The Germans just stood back and watched.

  “We all heard this was going on in the towns nearby. The mob was becoming more and more wild, more and more bloodthirsty. Terrible, terrible things were being done: beheadings, people being buried alive. It was like a hysteria, a mass hysteria.

  “Joszef…Joszef was very excited. The Jews were getting what they deserved because they were all communists, he told me. I said to him, what makes you say such a thing? Father Pawlicki told me, he said. Father Pawlicki said it was time to settle the score with the people who had murdered Christ.”

  “But the communists were against Christianity.”

  “Sure. But whatever evil there was in the world, the Jews were behind it. That’s how they thought, the Poles. That’s how Joszef thought. I tell you, it was a madness. That was pure evil.

  “Our town though had been quiet. Jedwabne had been calm. So Jews fled there from the places where these pogroms had been happening. The bishop promised he would protect the Jews in Jedwabne, that he wouldn’t allow such things to happen there. But my brother was telling me something very different. He was…he was horribly excited. So I knew something terrible was about to happen in our town. We all knew. Everyone knew.

  “That day, that terrible day in July, from dawn onwards, a mob from local villages started gathering in Jedwabne. They were talking to the Gestapo, cooking it up together. The town council signed an agreement with the Gestapo, an agreement about what was going to happen. What the Poles were about to do.

  “Some men came to our house, men we knew: all louts, thugs. They knew my brother Joszef. They were carrying pitchforks and clubs. I heard one of them say, ‘It’s starting,’ and my brother pulled on his jacket and picked up an iron bar. I held on to him, I begged him not to go, but he threw me off. I would have followed him, I knew what he was capable of, I’d seen it, I would’ve run after them to stop hi
m, but I hesitated…”

  She paused and wiped her eyes with her hand.

  “Later that day, he burst through the door like a thing possessed. His hair was wild, his clothes covered in blood and soot, his face streaked black with dirt. He was dragging a sack. He had been drinking, I could smell it, but this wasn’t drunkenness. It was…it was like a kind of ecstasy, almost a religious transfiguration. Except it wasn’t that, it was demonic, it was from the devil himself.

  “He started to shout in a kind of triumph, like a madman; and you know, I couldn’t stop myself thinking of these stories Boruch would tell us about the dybbuk. Well it was like that. He wasn’t my brother anymore, he didn’t sound like my brother, this terrible, terrifying voice coming out of his mouth as he stood there shouting…”

  He spoke as gently as he could. “What had he done?”

  She twisted her hands together. “I had a friend, a very good friend: Julia. She worked for the Germans as a secretary in the gendarmerie. She told me afterwards what happened, she saw some of it and the Germans told her the rest. They had stood there throughout, the Germans, just watching what was happening and taking photographs.”

  She shook her head slowly from side to side, as if trying to shake away the memory.

  “All the Jews were told to assemble in the town square for cleaning duty. All day long the Poles beat them to death, hacked their heads off, raped the woman and massacred them with their children. No one could run away; the Poles cut them off and slaughtered them. It was a frenzy.

  “Everywhere they were beaten, knifed, mutilated. Everywhere they were forced to sing and dance as they were cut down. One old man—they set fire to his beard. They were made to topple a statue in the square, a statue of Lenin, and under a hail of blows to dig a hole to bury the pieces, and they made them sing as they dug the hole; then they were butchered and thrown into the same hole.

  “Then they lined the Jews up, four in a row. They were all ordered to sing and they were herded and beaten into a barn. Sleszynski’s barn. Some young men stood nearby playing instruments. The more the Jews screamed, the louder they played. They poured kerosene around the barn, threw the rest inside and set fire to it.”