In the Land of Armadillos

by Helen Maryles Shankman

  The priest nodded. Encouragingly, the old man thought.

  “The first thing the Nazis did when they got here was round up anyone with a brain. The mayor, Jablonski. The superintendent of the schools, Wygand. The judge, Wiesneski. Slipowitz, who was something important in industry, I don’t remember what. Anyone who could think for themselves. They marched them all off to the forest and shot them. But do you see that in the history books?”

  The priest nodded sympathetically. “Terrible,” he agreed.

  “The Jews, that was later,” the old man continued morosely. “In 1942.”

  “How can you possibly remember?” said the priest. “You must have been very young. Six? Seven?”

  The old man’s thin lips curved upward, and then he broke into a dry, shrunken laugh. “You are a flatterer, Father,” he said, shaking his head. “I was born in 1927. Eleven years old when the Germans came.” He released his grandson’s hand so that he could wipe the end of his nose with a soiled handkerchief that he excavated from his coat pocket. Immediately, the little boy turned to the task of making snowballs.

  “I remember everything about that day. The sun was shining, turning everything to gold. A soldier came down that road on a motorcycle with a sidecar. He stopped at the pump for a drink of water.” The old man sighed moodily. He took off his hat, an old moth-eaten karakul with earflaps, to run a gloved hand over his sparse white hair. “We lived at the edge of town then, next to a Jewish family. The Singers. The parents, Moshe and Maryam. The children, Aron, Cilla, Reuven, Sender.”

  “You remember their names.”

  “Of course I remember their names, what do you think? I practically grew up in that house.” The priest tipped his head to one side, listening. The old man explained, “My mother died when I was very young. My father worked for the earl, managing his forests. How could he know what to do with a little boy?”

  “A hard life,” suggested the priest.

  “Yes. A hard life, always,” he agreed emphatically. He plopped his hat back on his head with a flourish, meaning he had said everything he was going to say.

  “Were there a lot of Jews in this town?” the priest asked quickly.

  “No more than anywhere else.” He squinted out at the trees beyond the gray Soviet-era building blocs. “It wasn’t true, you know, what they used to say about them,” he said suddenly. “Not all Jews were rich. The Singers didn’t have much. But everything they did have, they shared with me. Sender, the youngest, we were in the same class at school. We used to play together. We were like this.” He twined the second and third fingers of his left hand together, the fingers thick like sausages. “They saw how things were at our house. Sender used to invite me for dinner. Maryam never said no.”

  The old man went on now, absorbed in the past. “The father, Moshe. He was a shoichet, a Jewish butcher, with a long black beard down to here. Times were hard. The Depression, you know. They didn’t pay him with money. He used to bring home the cuts nobody wanted: hearts, lungs, stomachs, brains. Someone else would have thrown them out. But by the time Maryam was finished with them, they were delicious, as fine as anything you’d get at the fanciest restaurant in . . . in Paris.” He looked at the priest defiantly, as if he expected an argument. Finding none, he went on.

  “We used to get in trouble all the time. My father was the keeper of the earl’s lands, but it didn’t stop us from poaching fish from the stream, or picking apples from his orchards.” He smiled wryly with the memory, revealing a series of gaps and gold teeth in his wrinkled mouth. “The lands went on and on. See these buildings?” He waved his hands at the line of gray apartment blocks marching off into the distance down Wirka Street. “This was all forest back then, part of the earl’s property.”

  The old man plunged on, his pale eyes alight with pleasure. “We didn’t have fishing poles. We would take Maryam’s big wooden bowl, the one she used to knead bread. We’d set the bowl in the river and stand there with our pants legs rolled up, ready with bushel baskets. When the fish came to nibble on the crusts of dough, we’d scoop them up and bring them home.

  “This one time we had just finished filling a sack with apples. It was October, the year before the war started. The leaves were just beginning to turn yellow. The harvest was already in. You could see haystacks standing here and there, the tops pointed, like little huts. Anyway . . . Sender was climbing down from a tree in the earl’s orchard. Out of the corner of my eye, I spotted my father, running toward us down a long lane of apple trees. He was holding a big stick and shaking it at us. Oh, could he holler! I never saw anybody come down a tree that fast. Sender tossed me the bag, threw himself over the gate, and we ran like our behinds were on fire!”

  The old man was smiling again. The priest had the impression that he didn’t smile often. “I can still see my father behind the gate, shaking his fist at us and screaming curses. I really caught it when I finally had the courage to come home. He gave me a real licking. Beat me so hard, I couldn’t sit down the next day. Sender got two lickings. One for tearing his clothes, one for stealing apples.” He shook his head, muttered darkly, “Like the earl would miss a few apples.”

  “Were many Polish boys friendly with Jewish children?”

  “Oh, no. There was a lot of hatred, even before the Nazis came. People were suspicious of the Jews; they said they were Christ killers or spies for the Communists.”

  “What was it like when the Germans came?” said the priest.

  “Like I said, first they made a big show, got rid of the intelligentsia. Then they killed some Jews and passed a lot of anti-Jewish laws, just to prove they were in charge.”

  “What kind of laws?”

  “Let me see . . . ” He squinted hard into the sun, trying to remember. “Jews had to give up their businesses . . . couldn’t buy food . . . couldn’t take streetcars . . . had to wear an armband with a star on it . . . couldn’t kill animals the kosher way. Also, the Jewish kids couldn’t go to school anymore. That was the end of school for me, too. If Sender wasn’t going, neither was I.” He smiled, a lopsided, boyish grin.

  “For a while, it wasn’t so bad. The father, Moshe, now he had to sneak around to do his job, but he was still a butcher, they had what to eat. There were a lot of poor people. Maryam was always sending us over to someone’s house, someone with even less. We’d bring them a pot of soup, some stew, a loaf of bread.” He glanced down at the snowy ground. “She was a saint, that woman. A saint.

  “But Sender and me, we still had fun. We were never bored. Not like today’s kids. We’d spend hours building forts in the houses that were blown up when the Germans first came, and spend the rest of the day playing war, throwing chestnuts and rotten apples at the other kids. Some days it was the Americans against the Germans, some days it was the Russians against the Germans . . . some days the good guys won, some days the bad guys. There was always something to do. The day we went deep into the forest and came back with berries and mushrooms, Moshe and Maryam treated us like heroes.”

  The priest smiled. “That was very brave of you.”

  The old man hunched his coat up around his face, his features almost disappearing behind the upturned collar. “I wasn’t so brave,” he muttered.

  Now his tone turned somber. “In 1941 all the Jews had to move to the ghetto, in the poorest, most rundown part of town. That was when the situation really started to go downhill. They were picking people up off the street and shooting them. I didn’t see the Singers so much after that. You could get into trouble for being too friendly with Jews.” He lapsed into silence.

  “What about you?” the priest prodded him, his forehead furrowing with concern. “You were just a kid. Who took care of you after that?”

  “That’s when I started hunting,” he said. “Rabbits, birds. When the Nazis came, they confiscated the earl’s property and turned it into a labor camp. Now my father worked for the Germans. I had to be very careful; you could be killed for poaching on Reinhart’s land. He w
as commandant of the labor camp, all the forests belonged to him. I became an expert at being quiet, at being invisible, like I was a rock or a stump.”

  “Sounds risky.”

  “Yes, well, I had to eat, right?”

  “Were you ever caught?”

  The old man turned his gaze toward the little boy, who was erecting a snowman near a row of cars. He had already collected a large boulder of snow for the base and was unsuccessfully trying to fit a smaller snowball on top of it.

  “He’s going to be a builder,” commented the priest, noting the old man’s silence. “Eric, why don’t you help him out?” he suggested to the young man accompanying him. Obediently, Eric got down on his knees in the snow.

  The priest was sunk in thought for a moment before he summoned up the next question. “Did you ever see the Singers again?”

  “They left,” the old man replied. “One day I went to the ghetto, asking about Sender. But they were gone. Some people did that. They went to live with friends or farmers, or they just vanished into the forests. Moshe knew his way around pretty well. He had to travel through the woods in his work, going from town to town. I was sad because, you know, they were like family to me. But I knew it was for the best. One day the war would be over, and I hoped they would be all right.”

  The little boy came over to the patch of grass, looked dubiously at his grandfather. “I’m going to be late,” he said. “It’s going to be cleanup time.”

  “Go play in the snow,” said the old man. Meekly, the little boy returned to his snowman. “You asked if I ever got caught,” he said. His hands were thrust deep in his pockets, he was looking up at the sky. “The sky was blue, like today, and cold. There was snow on the ground. I was in a remote part of the woods, where I used to go with Sender, tracking grouse. No one should have been there. No one.”

  “Grouse,” repeated the priest.

  “A kind of game bird,” he said. “There were all these tracks in the snow. Hoofprints from boar. Bird feet. Squirrel tracks. Deer, of course. A wolf. Even the pawprints of a large bear.”

  “A bear!” the priest exclaimed. “Here?”

  The old man nodded. “Yes. Not anymore. They were rare even then. But that was when I saw the footprints.

  “There was a knoll, a kind of hill, with trees standing on top of it and footprints in the snow all around. Branches scattered near the front disguised an opening. Right away, I knew that someone was living inside there. Someone had made themselves a bunker inside this little hill.

  “I was so distracted that I forgot to be careful until it was too late. Angry voices shouted at me in German. I must have stumbled right into one of their patrols. They had me surrounded. Four soldiers were walking slowly toward me, their rifles pointed at my chest.

  “They told me to put down my gun, put my hands in the air. I thought, This is it, they’re going to kill me, and I started to cry. I was only fifteen, you know.

  “They looked at my clothes, and the grouse I was carrying, and then they started to laugh. Except for the uniforms, they were just like me, young men out for a hunt on a beautiful winter day. Until they saw the birds, they thought I was a partizan. They hated partizans.

  “They gave me back my gun, offered me a cigarette, a chocolate bar. They wanted to know where I had found the grouse. I could speak a little German—it’s similar to the Yiddish I picked up from the Singers—and this made them even more excited. None of the Poles spoke German except the Jews.

  “I was so relieved. And what was more, I had made new friends, important friends. Deep inside, I was thrilled. This could be the start of something big. Maybe they could help me get a job, a good job, that made real money . . . then my father would have to treat me with more respect. I could be a hunting guide or a gamekeeper. I wanted to make myself useful to them. After all, weren’t they our new leaders?

  “That was what I was thinking when I showed them the footprints in the snow.”

  He pulled out the soiled handkerchief again. It was very cold. He had to keep wiping his nose.

  “One of the Germans kicked apart the branches covering the opening and shouted at whoever was in there to come out. Six people came crawling up out of that hole. They were like raccoons after hibernation, blinded by the light. As they climbed out one by one, the soldiers booted them into the snow.

  “To tell you the truth, I didn’t recognize them at first. They had wasted down to skin and bones. Their hair was long and matted, their clothes were tattered rags. They had been hiding there for almost a year, living on mushrooms and roots. The Singers.

  “The soldiers clapped me on the back, congratulating me on my find. One said, ‘Let’s kill them right here.’ Another one said, ‘No. I have an idea.’ He said to me, ‘Why don’t you come with us, this will be fun.’

  “So we started walking. We walked and we walked and we walked. All the time, Sender was next to me, whispering in my ear. ‘Stefan, why did you tell them? Stefan, how could you give us away? Stefan, Stefan, Stefan, Stefan!’ ” He clapped his hands over his ears as if he could still hear his friend’s voice. “I said, ‘How was I supposed to know it was you in there? It could have been anyone.’ ”

  The priest nodded, understanding.

  “After an hour of walking, we could hear voices, laughter, gunfire. There were trucks and motorcycles, horses, dogs. Important-looking men in shiny leather coats. Officers with medals and ribbons. It was like the circus came to town. Off to one side was a big hole in the ground. A group of Jews being guarded by soldiers stood behind a rope.

  “Reinhart was there, of course.” The priest’s eyelids were lowered; he looked as if he were sleeping. “He was standing with a couple of other officers. He looked very pale. He knew some of the people being killed, they worked for him. He had promised that he would protect them. Either he was lying or his friends back in Berlin had other ideas.”

  Now the old man fell quiet. He looked over at his grandson. The little boy had found some scraps of coal. Eric had collected branches that they could use as arms. His knit cap was sitting rakishly upon the snowman’s round head.

  Quietly, the old man resumed his story. “A group of soldiers was smoking and leaning on their rifles, passing around a bottle of liquor. My new friends introduced me to their officer. He seemed happy to meet me; he clapped his hands together and asked if I could help them out. The soldiers were all laughing because I was so young.

  “My knees were like jelly, but I did what he said. A line of Jews ran over, stopped in front of us. People I knew. Weissbrot, who used to sell candy and newspapers at a store around the corner from the market square. Professor Schulz, one of the teachers at the high school. Rapaport, whom I used to play soccer with.

  “The officer shouted a command. The soldiers put out their cigarettes and lifted their guns. When he gave the word, I pulled the trigger. The Jews fell down into the pit.”

  “My God,” said Eric reflexively. The priest bent him a sharp look.

  The old man noticed. His brows lowered in a frown. “What else could I do?” he said roughly. “You couldn’t just say no. I had to think about myself, my father’s position. What would you have done?” Agitated, he took off his hat and rubbed thick, stubby fingers over his pink scalp.

  Fearful that Eric’s outburst might have frightened the old man into silence, the priest scoured his brain for an innocuous question to get him talking again. But before he could think of anything to say, the old man went on in his dry, papery voice.

  “They weren’t all dead. Some of them were only wounded, moaning, trying to free themselves. It didn’t make a difference; someone scattered sand over them, the officer called for more Jews.”

  “The Singers were in this next group. Directly in front of me was Moshe, the father. They were ordered to strip. He was standing before me naked, holding his hands over his private parts. I lowered my rifle, I couldn’t do it. This man had been like a father to me. But then I saw my new friends watching me. I raised
my rifle to my shoulder. When the officer gave the command, I fired.”

  He was quiet for a long while after that, so long that the priest thought he was finished with his story. He was surprised when the old man’s voice stuttered querulously back to life, cracking in the frigid air.

  “Why did I look down into the pit? I didn’t want to see her dead. I wanted to remember her the way she used to be. But then a powerful fear came over me. What if she was only wounded? What if she was suffering?”

  “Her?” the priest was confused. “She? Who are you talking about?”

  The old man didn’t seem to notice that he was there. “I stepped forward and looked down into the trench. The rest of them had died instantly, thank God. They lay in each other’s arms, close together, even in death. Except for Cilla. My darling Cilla . . . ”

  He broke down, began to weep. The sound was like the parts of a machine grinding together, rusted from disuse. “It was Cilla who was my friend, Cilla who invited me home, Cilla I went fishing with, Cilla who got spanked when we stole the apples. My sweet, beautiful Cilla, with her long brown hair and laughing green eyes, the pink mouth I always wanted to kiss . . . When my father beat me, it was Cilla who put her arm around me, Cilla who teased me until I smiled again.”

  He was staring off into the distance, past the dull gray buildings, the black, leafless branches with their burden of ice. “She was sitting up, holding her stomach with both hands. A bad way to go. It takes a long time to die, and you are in pain the whole way. Even worse, maybe they would bury her alive.”

  He screwed his hands into fists, pressed them into his eyes. “How could that szwab miss?” he burst out bitterly. “He was five steps away from her.” For a moment he stood there scowling and shaking his head, an angry old man remembering an ancient hurt.