by Ezra Glinter
“Comrades, surround the door!” he ordered. “Present arms.”
Like automatons, the soldiers immediately obeyed. In the rising sun, their bayonets shone red, as if covered in blood. The giant sailor made a gesture and suddenly a small thing, wrapped in oil cloth, materialized. When the tarp was taken off, it revealed a machine gun.
“Fire!” commanded the commissar, and the sound of rifles could be heard.
“Fire!” the sailor’s bass echoed, followed by the crackling sound of the machine gun. It was as if the thing that had been under the tarp was choking on something too big for its throat.
All the passengers threw themselves on the ground. I could hear the blasts of gunfire and machine guns and the screams of men on both sides. Soon, we heard the commissar’s voice, recognizable because of his Yiddish r’s.
“Comrades, throw your hand grenades!”
I held my breath as I burrowed my face deeper into the dirt, listening hard for the grenades that would surely come next. But suddenly, the machine-gun fire stopped and all was quiet. It was a heavy silence, worse than all the previous noise.
When I got up from the ground, everything was over. Yellow smoke could be seen through the dawn’s light. The smell of gunpowder was everywhere. Sailors jumped down from the open train car, with hands raised above their heads. The commissar, with his Mauser in hand, searched every one of them and threw down each pistol, rifle, and bullet belt he found.
“Take it away and guard it” he said to one of his soldiers, who was dragging the machine gun.
With his pistol butt, he counted the sailors. “Don’t move!” he warned. “If you budge, you’ll get a bullet in the head.”
The sailors stood motionless and pale. The giant’s cheeks were shaking, going up and down as if they belonged to a bulldog. Only the older, stooped sailor with the pale, tired face swayed in his long, wide sailor pants that looked empty, as if there were no legs in them. He kept on tearing at his throat, yelling, “They’re drinking our blood! Look!”
“We’ll look in the stockade,” the young commissar said lightly, as if nothing at all had happened.
He jumped up into the conquered carriage quickly, along with some dozen soldiers, and began to empty it. “Faster, Comrades,” he thundered.
The soldiers started throwing out all sorts of smuggled goods: a bag of salt and a screeching girl; a pack of leather and a crying girl; some cotton and a fainting girl. With every new piece of contraband, the young man laughed louder.
“Look at what they’re carrying, the pride of the revolution!” he said loudly, staring at the sailors who stood squeezed next to one another, still with their hands raised and surrounded by pointed bayonets.
The passengers were silent, looking with wide eyes at the numerous bags and sacks that had been thrown onto the ground. My neighbors on the roof avoided looking at anyone.
The locomotive began to whistle, creak, smoke. The commissar told the arrested men to put their baggage on their backs and encircled them with his armed soldiers. With his revolver in hand, he counted and recounted the prisoners several times and loudly ordered, with his Yiddish r’s:
“Walk in a straight line. Don’t turn around. March!”
The bright sun reflected off the bayonets of the armed men. The locomotive suddenly whistled frightfully, as if warning the remaining passengers that it was getting ready to leave.
61 Symon Vasylyovych Petliura (1879–1926) was a leader in Ukraine’s fight for independence following the 1917 Russian Revolution.
62 Anton Ivanovich Denikin (1872–1947) was a general in the White Army during the Russian Civil War (1917–1922), fighting against the Communist Reds.
63 Small town.
64 Semyon Budyonny (1883–1973) was a Soviet military leader. Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry stories are loosely based on his experiences with Budyonny’s troops.
65 Marusye was the nom de guerre of Maria Grigorevna Nikoforova, an anarchist partisan leader.
66 About thirty-six pounds.
67 Nestor Ivanovych Makhno (1888–1934) was an anarchist called Batko (Father) Makhno. He commanded the Revolutionary Insurrectionary Army of Ukraine, which fought various factions in order to maintain control of southern Ukraine.
68 Nikolay Dukhonin (1876–1917) was the last commander-in-chief of the Russian Imperial Army. Revolutionary soldiers dragged him from a train and killed him after he was relieved of his duties.
69 Baron Pyotr Vrangel (1878–1928) had been in the Russian Imperial Army. He later became the commanding general of the White Army during the Civil War.
David Zaritski
1914–1978
DAVID ZARITSKI WAS unusual among Forward contributors in that he was an Orthodox rabbi, writer, and journalist who was active primarily in Israel’s Orthodox Jewish press.
Born in Pinsk, in what is now Belarus, Zaritski studied in the local branch of the Novaredok yeshiva, a network of rabbinical seminaries that focused on ethical and spiritual development. He later went to study in the yeshiva of Rabbi Israel Meir Kagan, better known as the Chofetz Chaim, in Radin, Poland.
During the Second World War, Zaritski fled to Siberia and after the war moved to France, where he worked with young Holocaust survivors and published a collection of poetry titled Oysgetrinkte oygn (Dried-Out Eyes).
In 1949 he immigrated to the newly founded State of Israel and settled in the religious Tel Aviv suburb of Bnei Brak. In Israel, Zaritski became one of the founders of the Orthodox newspaper Hamodia (The Informer), and served as a contributor to the Yiddish magazine Di Yidishe heym (The Jewish Home), a publication of the Chabad Hasidic movement.
Zaritski was a prolific journalist throughout his life, although his most influential work was a novel for young readers published in 1952. Translated from Yiddish to Hebrew under the title Shimke: Yeladim be-maskhet ha-gvurah shel ha-dor (Shimke: Children in the Heroic Chapter of the Generation), the novel tells the story of an eight-year-old boy who fights as a partisan in the forests of Poland.
“The Edge of Death” appeared in the Forward on June 20, 1948, just after the founding of the State of Israel, during a trip by Zaritski to the United States. A prefatory note to the piece describes the author as a frequent contributor to the newspaper who has “dedicated his life to Jewish migration to Israel” and whose story is based on his own experience during the war.
The Edge of Death
(JUNE 20, 1948)
Translated by Chana Pollack
I AM THE GRAVEDIGGER.
Small and large, deep and flat, wide and narrow graves. It all depends on who died and when. For instance, during the typhus epidemic, I had no time to dig proper graves of one meter’s depth, as is necessary. I was only able to burrow down far enough so that the straw mat shrouds didn’t peek out. The deceased waited patiently, their feet curled up into a smile at the tiny slats beneath them, at the tall mountains, and at the high chimneys of the brick factory. In the evening’s darkness their faces mix together with the alabaster lime, and I’ve got to take care not to sling an extra corpse in as I dig another grave.
Raging dysentery demands narrow graves. The dead are then as lean as the wooden planks that serve as tombstones, which sit in waiting alongside. Placed in the earth, the dead make a flimsy sound. Corpses tall or short resemble birch twigs that have drifted for a while through the barren forest and will splinter with any movement. Not to mention the children. The first time I dug a child’s grave I recalled having once scooped out a similar hollow in our orchard for our little kitten. But then I cried and now I wait impatiently for the bitty grave to be filled in already, so I can get my couple of rubles.
I only dig graves at dusk. I labor all day long at the local brick factory, pushing wheelbarrows full of raw bricks to the oven. Behind me is the constant bellowing of the tall Uzbeki named Albakov:
“You, Padla 70 Nu! Get to it, you stiff!”
Padla meant me. What difference was there, between me and the white horse grazing all ni
ght long, not wanting to drag the lime, while I dawdle, neither eating nor sleeping, and still having to lug the wheelbarrow along.
Another thing I’ll always remember about pounding the burning ground barefoot—the carrion.
A horse can’t by any means be a counterrevolutionary nor be sentenced to such labors.
When, at the end of the month, I received my wages in the amount of thirty-eight rubles cash, there was no way I could have known what to do with that money. I might have purchased quite a few things—a couple pounds of bread or a bit less than a liter of milk, four cups of dried black sunflower seeds, a kilo of potatoes.
Yes indeed, I could have gorged on a meal with that money. I wouldn’t have been too sated afterwards, but at least I’d have savored the pleasurable taste of bread in my mouth.
And what about the remaining thirty days? God didn’t abandon me. People were dying like flies. Each one dying as it was willed—some from typhus, some from dysentery, from hunger, from lice and filth, and there were those who simply dropped dead in the street. A burial society was formed, and once that was in place, a burial specialist was needed—not to supervise the cemetery, but to dig the graves. So in the evening, after my factory work, I dug graves, charging sixty rubles each, and by the time they’d finished saying the mourner’s prayer I was already at the market buying bread with my money.
Understand? Bread!
And when three days passed and nobody died, I didn’t eat for three days.
On the fourth day I was informed that there was a grave to dig. A large grave, they told me, and deep—meaning it’s a regular corpse. He died the usual way, an elderly man in his bed.
Evening was descending and could be seen through the mountain gaps, creeping higher up their peaks. Cemeteries surrounded the area. To the left was a Polish one. A memorial for Anders’s Army, 71 three long rows of graves with little white crosses looking like dead solders standing at attention. The graves leaned on each other as though they were about to topple over. On the right, pouring out like a wave, were the Uzbeki graves, wide and small with large mounds of earth. They seemed to be looking on mutely and severely at the clay huts built into the mountains. Higher even, where one mountain split into two, the Russian cemetery scrambled over it. There the Communists weren’t the majority. Nearly all the graves had crosses crafted simply from two thin slivers glued together, gnarled and wretched. They’d fall off daily only to be raised back up. Fewer boasted a lonely, defiant red marker, carved out of stone or sticks of wood. Communist leaders lay beneath them.
Right to their side on the descent of a small mountain was the Jewish cemetery. When I first took up my post, there were only a few graves of the older Bukharan Jewish settlers. Now the cemetery covered the mountain and tumbled down into the neighboring valley. These were dismal graves, caved in, as thin and gangly as their owners. Those who had erected wooden headstones would find them stolen by morning. There was neither brick nor cement available and frequently, over time, your foot would get tangled up in the straw mat shroud of a nameless corpse.
It made no difference to me who lay there. I had to dig the grave, a large one, measuring one meter eighty in length, eighty centimeters wide, and one meter twenty deep. Since the deceased had a family, he wasn’t wrapped in a straw shroud but in white shrouds. People wept. Yes, people cried, and I was astonished and terrified. They didn’t drag him by the shoulder like an old chunk of wood they’d filched, but honorably. It was impressed upon me that I’d receive eighty and not sixty rubles this time. This was my third day without bread. With no bread it was impossible to work—and so it would go.
The route wasn’t long but it was uphill. It wasn’t my feet but the eighty rubles that dragged me onward—the three pounds of bread I’d have in my hands in an hour or two. The food would sate my eyes for a bit and then I’d bite into the cushy, supple bread with my chattering teeth. Each scrap down my throat would cause tremors through my body.
That very same hunk of bread rolled ahead of me, coaxing me uphill. The evening air cooled my clammy face, and even the lice had sympathy and let me be.
I collapsed at the site where I was to dig the grave and felt my heart about to burst from my chest. I was trembling from exertion. I lay on the hard, cold ground. The evening dew, like white ocean foam, covered me delicately. It made the mountains seem close together, and it seemed that soon the crosses would roll down like boulders from the mountain streams and cover me over.
Somewhere a goat bleated and the echo resounded a thousandfold. It made a strange barking sound that rippled as it crashed over each stone and as it rolled between tombstones and crosses, until in the end it clung to the earthen mounds. The sun had long since lain down on the other side of the mountain, and the scorched grass seemed to undulate before ceasing its whispering as it was veiled by dew.
All I saw was the breathtaking vision of a huge, three-pound lump of bread wheeling before my eyes. The life that tried to roll away from my weakened heart hung before me. All I needed was one hour, only one hour’s toil, and then—
B-R-R-R-R-E-A-D!!!
After that I’d lie on the ground in my hutch, sleeping peacefully, stuffed.
My mood picked up. A bit wobbly, I gritted my teeth and began to carve up the dense, clay earth with my pickaxe. Beneath that first layer the earth was much softer and I could already work with a shovel. Minutes passed. Hacking at it increased my circulation, my muscles twitched, I was drenched in sweat and yet dehydrated. The earthen pile grew high. The ditch got deeper, taking on the shape of a grave.
Suddenly, I felt an enormous raindrop on my face. That was a hideous jolt; it never rained there in the summertime. And now, suddenly, rain.
The drops got larger, sticking to my cotton cap and weighing it down. The rain got heavier until it was no longer a shower but a storm. Like most rainstorms there, it was torrential, and I was completely soaked. That wouldn’t have been so terrible had it not completely soaked the clay beds. The earth stuck to the shovel. I’d dig and try to throw dirt off, and couldn’t. Every shovelful was so heavy I couldn’t hoist it, and had to unpack each one by hand.
I felt my hands getting heavier. Perhaps it wasn’t my hands but the shovel. It gradually drew me towards the ground, hunched over. My feet dragged through the grave’s clay bottom until I could no longer move. My God! How heavy the human foot can be! The grave narrowed. I felt the walls pressing in on me, creeping along, coming apart and then cleaving back together again. They seemed sticky and horrifyingly cold to my watery eyes—and silent.
The shovel drops out of my hand. It falls and splashes mud on my face. Only now do I feel water trickling in on all sides of the grave, covering my toes.
I leaned against the walls of the grave and felt the clay saturate my shirt and penetrate my body, slithering over it like long, cold worms. I felt the ground tugging at me. She reached out to me on all sides, beckoning me with her sopping clay hands. From the mountains came the muted sounds of footsteps in the distance. The fog shifted, becoming bitter and menacing. Suddenly thousands of dark eyes lit up the rain-drenched darkness. Peering into my woozy eyes, they laughed provocatively. The water in the grave had now reached my knees and I sunk slowly deeper. My feet froze, like two wooden slabs mired in the clay. I was finally left sitting and weeping in the brackish water.
What would be?
I wasn’t thinking any longer. All I wanted was to eat. I felt death’s slow approach from high atop those mountains and from lower down. It was coming from underneath, crawling upwards like a snake from my feet to my heart, my chest, my mouth . . .
I had dug myself a grave. I couldn’t stop the thought from burrowing into me. I ruminated on it as peacefully as I used to consider my dinner plans.
The grave was exactly my size; there would be no need to dig either longer or wider. I was as spindly as the spade handle that was drifting aimlessly in the water and that couldn’t be hoisted out. And when the moment came and they arrived with the deceased,
folks would search for me, cursing me out, saying that I’d abandoned my post mid-job. When they approached the graveside to relinquish him, they would trample on me.
I reflected on this very calmly. Just then all my fear of death was lifted. In its place was the incessant craving for relief; to stretch out on a soft, warm bed, sipping a cup of tea with raspberry preserves, drifting into sleep. Most important—my feet would no longer be stuck here. Marooned in the brackish gray water, they tormented me dreadfully. I tried to move, but my energy had gone under. My hat lay askew over my eyes and I couldn’t straighten it out.
Through numb lips I recited the confessional prayer. The rain cascaded into my mouth and I heard myself rasp. The words surfaced and were cast out into the rain and fog.
I felt the water rise. My arms were partially submerged by the time I’d recited my confession and it was a truncated version:
“God! Thank you for the effortless death, as for my ghastly life. The graves were my subsistence, and now they’re clawing it all back.”
I bowed weakly and felt something so heavy crushing my cumbersome head that I could no longer hold it up. The burden moved deeper within me, and my hungry heart swiftly and firmly snapped shut, stunning me . . .
The folks arriving later on with the corpse found me. It was exactly as I’d imagined it, before I lost consciousness. They were angry with me and meant to finish digging the grave on their own, when they leaped into the half-dug grave and fell right on top of me.
They told me that they spent a long time trying to revive me, and thought the grave would be mine. It seems I was fated to go on living, in order to tell you how it is to be on the edge of death.
70 A Russian curse.
71 The informal name for the Polish Armed Forces in the East, led by commander Wladyslaw Anders.
Wolf Karmiol
1910–1987
WOLF KARMIOL WAS a writer, teacher, journalist, and survivor of the Lodz Ghetto. In his fiction he often depicted his own experiences, both during and after the Holocaust.