In the Land of Armadillos

by Helen Maryles Shankman

  * * *

  Two weeks later, they came for us.

  With the enthusiastic application of clubs and whips and guns, we were encouraged along the streets to the Market Square. A Selektion was going on, led by SS Gruber, Rohlfe, Hackendahl, and Haas. Falkner and Reinhart were there, too, their workers stowed safely away behind them.

  We were being steered toward Haas, who had a reputation as a cold-blooded killer. Today, though, he seemed preoccupied. He kept wiping his eyes with a big white handkerchief. He gave our papers a glance and sent us to the right. Together with seven hundred other Jews, we were hustled at a smart run into the Odeon Cinema.

  There’s something I didn’t tell you about my mother, something I probably should have mentioned earlier. One of her legs was a little shorter than the other, the only remaining trace of the polio she had encountered as a child. It gave a slight rolling pitch to her gait that I found charming; she always reminded me of a ship falling and rising through heavy seas.

  But now she couldn’t keep up with the crowd; as we ran, she lagged farther and farther behind. I wanted to keep her company, but I was afraid she would yell at me. A guard fell into step with her, screamed that she should run faster. She was really trying; sweat was beading over her brow. The guard, a tall, corpulent gorilla, kicked her to the ground.

  The last time I ever saw my mother, she was lying on the cobblestones in front of the Odeon Cinema.

  The last time I ever saw my mother, an SS man was bending over her.

  The last time I ever saw my mother, she had the slender barrel of a pistol pointed at the back of her head.

  Inside the theater, we claimed a section of the floor. Before us, onstage, velvet curtains the color of wine displayed the masks of comedy and tragedy. Above us, tiny white lightbulbs twinkled in a peacock-blue stucco sky.

  We sat slumped there for the rest of the day. I kept turning to Mama with questions, then grieving all over again when I remembered that she was gone. From time to time, the pop of gunfire would filter in from the street, making some of the women screech like birds. The world outside already seemed separate from us, like a scene from a movie playing in another theater.

  I was cold, I was hungry, I was scared. An officer came in and announced that we were being transported somewhere farther east, where there would be food and lodging upon our arrival. People nowadays are surprised that we believed this.

  “Wouldn’t this be a good time for the Moshiach to come?” asked Mushka mournfully. My father pinched the bridge of his nose between his fingers and began to sob.

  I don’t know what day it was, or what time, when I awoke with Temma’s fingers over my mouth. It was dark, the Deutschen in their infinite wisdom had shut off the lights. The phony stars sparkled away in the faraway ceiling; perhaps they were controlled by a different switch. I struggled, trying to push her off me. I had been dreaming, and in my dream, my mother was waking me up for school.

  Suddenly, the Messiah was bending over me. He was chewing gum. “Hey, kid,” he said quietly. “Let’s get you out of here.”

  Gradually, as my eyes grew used to the dark, I saw Suri yawning and rubbing her eyes, Mushka asleep in my father’s lap. He was propped up against the stage, staring at nothing, like a dead man. When he saw Shua, he revived a little. “The Messiah,” he whispered ecstatically. “He has come for us after all.”

  “It’s just Shua,” he whispered back. “Shua has come to rescue you, and he’s not taking you to the Promised Land, he’s taking you to the forest. Are you coming or not?”

  My father stared at him, then covered his eyes with his hand and began to recite the Viduy, the traditional words of confession before dying.

  “Anyone else want to get out of here?” the Messiah offered our neighbors. “This is your big chance.”

  The other Włodawers shook their heads. “You’re going to get them all killed,” hissed Motke the Tummler, who told jokes at weddings.

  Shua took Mushka from my father’s arms. In the dark, we crawled on our bellies like snakes, slithering into the blackness of the orchestra pit. Under the stage, a door opened onto a wide, low-ceilinged room, the control center of theatrical artifice, where various painted scrims, curtains, and scenery were operated by ropes and pulleys along the walls. With perfect faith, we followed the Messiah through the innards of the movie palace, brushing up against ghostly props and costume racks, past posters for movies that were already fading from collective memory. At the terminus of a warren of dingy corridors, we reached our destination, a cement-block staircase ascending to a pair of metal doors. The cellar opened up out of the earth, delivering us into a weedy lot. That was the first miracle.

  We walked through deserted streets and alleyways, past houses with shutters closed tight against any knowledge of good or evil. We walked across frozen fields to the curtain of trees at the town’s edge. We walked through the earl’s forests, towering trunks of spruce and ash. We walked and walked and walked. We didn’t stop until we reached what looked like the remains of a small town at the very heart of the Parczew woods. I saw cold firepits with pots still inside them, laundry lines, shelters made from pine boughs. There was more—a smell, a rank unholy odor, like gasoline and burning tires and something else I won’t name.

  “Halte!” came the command, always shouted, never spoken. “Stillgestanden!”

  Slowly, we raised our hands in the air. Five German soldiers were advancing toward us, already sighting down their barrels. The moon glinted off the silver lightning slashes on their uniforms.

  “Looking for your friends?” said one of them, a comedian. “You just missed them. Perhaps you’ll find them in the next world.”

  Temma’s lips were moving. I knew she was whispering her final prayers. I grabbed Suri’s hand. “Don’t look,” I said fervently. “Shut your eyes. Say the Shema. Soon we’ll be together in shamayim.”

  Only baby Mushka was unafraid, staring at the soldiers with her thumb in her mouth. The comedian didn’t like that. “You,” he said to me, gesturing with his gun. “Make her stop looking at me.”

  “Mushka,” I said. My tongue was clumsy, stiff. “Come here.”

  But she dug in her heels as only a little girl can, entranced by the play of moonlight on the soldiers’ pips and collar tabs.

  “Now!” he brayed. Frightened, she screwed up her face and began to wail.

  One of the soldiers seemed uneasy, shifting his rifle from one shoulder to the other. “Shhh,” he said almost apologetically. “Please. It’s all right, tell her it’s going to be all right. Shhh . . . ”

  His voice faltered, then broke. He was very young, this soldier. Perhaps he was scared, too. Perhaps, when he signed up for the elite Waffen SS, he didn’t know that shooting women and children would be one of his primary duties.

  Our imminent martyrdom was interrupted by the Messiah.

  “I’m going to do it,” he said with determination to no one in particular. “You just watch.” His voice grew louder. “Really? That’s your expert advice? Okay, here’s what I want you to do. You’re going to need a pen so you can write it all down. I’ll speak real slow. Go. Take. A flying. Shit. In. The ocean.”

  The Germans found this wildly entertaining. They elbowed one another’s ribs, cackling like hyenas, except for the young soldier, who wouldn’t look at us. The comedian kicked at a mud-crusted shovel, which skidded across the pine needles and stopped at our feet. “Hey! Jewish dickhead! Shut your hole and start digging.”

  Shua was still deep in conversation. “Well, you knew what you were in for when you hired me, that’s all I can say.” Apparently, he didn’t like the answer he got, because his next words were “Oh, yeah? Just go ahead and stop me.” With his hands still up in the air, Shua addressed the young soldier. “You, German boy,” he said calmly. “I’m giving you a chance. Run. Run like hell.”

  The soldier wavered, then lowered his gun.

  “What are you doing, Pagel?” snapped the comedian. “I’m going
to report you.”

  But the boy’s gaze was fixed on the Messiah. He took a few unsteady steps backward, turned, and bolted. Cursing through clenched teeth, the comedian wheeled around and leveled his sights at a place between the young soldier’s shoulders.

  It was at this point that the Messiah levitated into the air over our heads.

  The SS men looked up, their mouths slack with astonishment. For a moment he remained there, serenely floating. Then he started to glow like a lightbulb. One by one, each of his fine features was illuminated, as if he were made of frosted glass. Before my eyes, he seemed to spin like a top, rotating faster and faster, rising slowly to the level of the highest branches. A weird humming noise filled the clearing, like the sound of a billion bees.

  I hit the ground, pulling Suri and Mushka down with me. There was a deafening crack, as if the heavens had split open, and then something rushed over me, a shock wave of wind and heat and energy, lifting the hairs all over my body to electric attention. I knew I was screaming, but I couldn’t hear it. The trees disappeared in a flash of brilliant white light.

  Years later, I would read about it in the scientific journals that cover such things, the strange astronomical occurrence that came to be referred to as “The Parczew Event.” This is what is known. In the predawn hours of November 19, 1942, the fiery splendor of a thousand suns lit the sky. The subsequent blast knocked down a hundred thousand trees in the forest just west of Włodawa, forming a pattern of tight concentric circles that fanned out over a square kilometer. The energy of the impact has been compared to the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan. The only eyewitness was a young German soldier who happened to be in the forest that night. I’ve seen footage of the interview, filmed in choppy black and white. The boy shivers uncontrollably, wrapped in a blanket. His hair and eyebrows are singed off. When prodded to tell his story, he jabbers of an avenging angel hurling lightning bolts from the sky.

  When I was sure it was over, I hoisted Mushka to her feet, and Temma brushed the dirt off of Suri’s knees. Together, we gazed around in wonder at the altered landscape. We were at the epicenter of a shallow bowl, surrounded by the stripped corpses of burning trees. Of the squad of German soldiers, there was not so much as a brass belt buckle.

  “I thought you couldn’t do miracles,” I accused our Messiah as he floated gently back down to earth.

  “No, I said I wouldn’t,” he replied sulkily as his feet touched the ground. “Not in the service of the Redemption, anyway. This is completely different.” He clapped his hand on my shoulder. “Come on, kid, let’s get out of here. In a couple of hours, this place will be crawling with Deutschen.”

  * * *

  Eventually, we caught up with the partizans. Eventually, the Messiah would lead us to the Föhrenwald DP Camp, near Munich. Eventually, he would marry my big sister, Temma. Eventually, we would follow him onto a ship bound for Palestine.

  Upon reviewing the photographs and the concentration camp log entries, after the arduous, incalculable calculations that added up to six million sacrificial Isaacs, in 1948, the children of Israel were allowed to return to the Promised Land. By then the world had already moved on to the next war. Peace continued to elude us, and the Nations still refused to agree on a God who might love all His children equally. All things the Messiah was supposed to solve before his death, from a bullet that passed through his heart during the lost battle for Jerusalem.

  I tried to research him, the man who became our Messiah. He didn’t make it easy. It became a game for him, to concoct a progressively wilder tale each time one of us asked about his past. He must have come from somewhere; after all, in our religion, the rabbis say there is a man capable of being the Savior in each generation.

  In 1975 I found my answer on the terrace of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. I was there to promote my new book, The Orphan’s Messiah. After my reading, a woman approached me and asked if I would meet her for a drink.

  We sat at a table that overlooked the crenellated walls of the Old City. Around us, diplomats and politicians murmured, constructing secret deals in many languages over cigarettes and Turkish coffee. She lived in Sydney now, she explained, and was visiting Israel for a bar mitzvah. Her voice was a charming and unlikely marriage of Polish warmth and Australian slang.

  His name was Yehoshua Tzedek, she said. He had begun life as a promising student at the celebrated Slabodka Yeshiva. In an escalating cascade of tragedy, both parents died, the money dried up, and the yeshiva bocher turned to a life of crime in nearby Vilna. He whored, he thieved, he trafficked in luxury goods on the black market. There was even a whiff of bigamy. When he sold watered-down gasoline to the Soviets, he earned three years in one of Stalin’s prisons.

  Then the Germans came. One Shabbat in the summer of 1941, right after the Torah reading, the notorious gangster Shua Tzedek entered the Great Synagogue through the main entrance and announced to the astonished assembly that angels had directed him to abandon his criminal ways, shed his modern clothes, mount a donkey, and ride to Jerusalem.

  Alas, it was a time when men on all sides lost their battles for sanity. Until she heard my story, the woman from Australia remembered my Messiah as one of them.

  I thanked her and paid for her drink. On my way out, I passed through the lobby, stopping for a moment to contemplate the signatures of former guests Golda Meir, Willy Brandt, Elie Wiesel, Lech Walesa, Günter Grass. Waiting for my car beneath a wall of purple bougainvillea, I smoked a cigarette and thought about what she’d said.

  Could it be true? Was my Messiah nothing more than an inspired lunatic, and the miracle that saved us a run-of-the-mill meteor? Were my memories real or just the imaginary by-product of a traumatized child’s desperate wish for salvation?

  There were many Messiahs in those years, coming from nowhere to emerge as heroes for a brief and terrifying time, vanishing afterward into the banality of everyday existence. If an ordinary man can be tapped to be the Messiah, a man as flawed and as human as Shua Tzedek, then perhaps any one of us is capable of bringing about the Redemption.

  There are days that I have trouble believing in a merciful God. But about the Messiah, I have no doubt. I know what I saw. Sixty years ago, he got as far as Włodawa. At this rate, he will be here soon.

  THEY WERE LIKE FAMILY TO ME

  There were two of them, arguing in front of the oblong patch of grass between the decrepit buildings. They didn’t look like they belonged there; both of them wore new coats made from fine fabric, well cut and nicely designed, clearly manufactured somewhere else, where people cared about such things. They were holding a map, chattering in a foreign language the old man didn’t recognize. One pointed at the map with a gloved hand, while the other shook his head in disagreement.

  “Excuse me,” said the older one in Polish as he passed by. “Perhaps you can help us out.”

  The old man was holding the hand of a small child. He was short and fat and out of breath. When he walked, he toddled, just like the little boy. “Are you Jewish?” he said. Though there were no Jews left in Włodawa, he had heard that sometimes they came to Poland to explore their heritage, to reclaim the house their grandfather had lived in, to search cemeteries for distant relatives.

  Both men smiled. “No. Not Jewish,” said the older of the two. The old man peered closer. Now he could see the white clerical collar just visible over the lapels of the older man’s overcoat. His cheeks reddened with embarrassment. “I’m sorry, Father. It’s just . . . in this part of Poland, we don’t get many visitors. Usually, they’re Jews. I just assumed . . . ”

  The priest waved it off. “Have you always lived here? In this town, I mean.”

  “Yes, always. Where are you from? You speak Polish, but I heard you speaking another language with your friend.”

  “I lived here for a while when I was a kid,” he said. “But I live in England now.”

  “England,” said the old man. “I’ve never been west of Warsaw.”

  The p
riest gestured toward the green patch of grass. “Perhaps you can tell me something about this place,” he suggested. “On my map, it says something happened here in 1942.”

  “Oh. Yes. Well . . . ” The old man’s gaze wandered. “My grandson . . . nursery school . . . ” he said vaguely.

  “Oh, I’m sorry. Please, don’t let me keep you.” It was a cold day. For warmth, the priest put his hands in his coat pockets. His eyebrows drew together, and he fished around inside his pocket until he pulled out a chocolate bar. It had a yellow wrapper with a picture of a little girl on it. “May I?” he asked.

  The old man nodded. The priest squatted down until he was level with the boy, who accepted the candy in his mittened hand. The priest smiled. The child looked back at him with grave, dark eyes.

  “You do this every day?” inquired the priest as he stood back up, brushing off his coattails. The old man nodded. Under his hat, the skin was fragile and thin, like parchment, except for his cheeks and the tip of his nose, which were a startling pink. “You’re a good grandfather.”

  The old man shrugged. “My only grandchild,” he replied.

  Nothing prevented him from leaving, but still, he lingered. There was something about the priest, his moist green eyes rimmed with long black lashes. It was the face of a man who had heard many sad stories. Just now he was gazing with curiosity at the grassy patch between the buildings.

  “It’s my own little project,” the priest explained almost apologetically. “Well. Obsession, really. I’m traveling around Poland, Russia, the Ukraine, trying to collect stories of what the Nazis did. Before the people who witnessed them are gone. Things that didn’t make it into the history books.”

  The old man’s lips compressed into a thin line. “The history books,” he said contemptuously, dismissing the entire genre. “All they ever tell you is what happened to the Jews. Never what happened to the Poles.” He added hastily, “It’s not their fault, of course. What happened to them was terrible, I’m not saying it wasn’t. All I’m saying is you never hear anything else.”