Death in Twilight

by Jason Fields

  Chapter 5

  Aaron Kaminski walked toward Breslaw Hospital under the gray light of noon. If anyone knew Berson’s business, it would be his partner. People became intimate during long nights on patrol. Aaron knew it from his own experience. He remembered many nights spent bored to death, waiting for something to happen and hoping that it never would. Talk helped to fill the time and to deal with the nerves.

  Aaron figured that Martin Gersh might not have witnessed the killing of his partner, but there was a good chance he would know what was behind it.

  The only concern Aaron had was the severity of Gersh’s injury. He assumed it was bad, only desperation drove people to seek help from the abattoirs the ghetto’s hospitals had become.

  Aaron was forced to make his way more slowly than he would have liked. His route led him straight through the ghetto’s mostly lively district. Everywhere, despite the cold, clumps of men gathered to sell the literal clothes off their backs to each other. It was a race to the depths of poverty.

  One pale man in a suit made up mostly of unidentifiable stains held up a small dressing gown made of fine satin, fit only for a child of fewer than two years. It was the kind of thing found in second-hand stores, sold or donated by parents whose children had grown.

  “Our youngest died last week of typhus. She no longer needs it,” the man told the prospective buyers, some of whom had a cynical look. It was impossible to know if the story was true or was meant to drive up the price through pity. It occurred to Aaron that the man may have stolen the dress and never had a child at all. No one in the ragged crowd was willing to part with even a groczy for the gown, so the seller moved on in search of a more biddable congregation.

  Aaron pushed his way past the beggars’ impromptu auctions, kept his chin tucked into the collar of his coat, his black hat tilted forward against the wind.

  Other, less pitiful, wares were also for sale on Gdansk Street, which had once been a promenade of shops and cafés where people went to display their wealth. Signs of that recent past poked through the shabbiness of Nazi occupation. Little flecks of gilt remained in the names carved above storefronts. Flickers of light occasionally escaped the clouds, causing the gold to glitter gaily. Those flecks were stubborn. No one had yet been able to peel them and sell them for a bowl of soup or a thin piece of cheese.

  A very few men and women who could be glimpsed inside café windows, something warm or warming to drink in their hands and, occasionally, laughter could be seen if not heard. The ghetto was not yet entirely a world of have-nots, though the divide had never been so sharp. Just a few doors down from a certain Café Bourdain was a bakery that had been turned into a soup kitchen. The line was long, the people pinched, their eyes either empty or filled with avarice for the steam they could see rising from the huge pots inside.

  Many of the men and women, some with children clutched tightly by the hand, would be sickened by what they ate. Common ingredients included the dregs and spoiled leftovers of better meals enjoyed by others.

  Those afflicted would quickly give back whatever nutrients they’d been able to take in. The truly unlucky would end up in a doctor’s care, or worse, in a hospital like Breslaw.

  Aaron had been lucky, so far, and stayed healthy. But he’d seen inside, either visiting people he knew or selling supplies. It was a desperate situation.

  Since the entry points to the Jewish quarter had been cauterized from the body of Miasto and its inherently superior inhabitants, medical care had deteriorated to a nearly medieval level, though even leeches were inaccessible to the doctors. There was no flowing water to fetch them from.

  Medical centers were set up in former storefronts, and doctors’ surgeries were converted to small hospitals by the Judenrat for the common good. There was no lack of doctors or nurses; though nearly everything else, from medicine to bandages, was in short supply.

  Before the war, Breslaw Hospital for Mental Defects and Diseases — where Aaron was headed — had functioned as an asylum for all of Miasto. Polish sufferers of retardation and schizophrenia resided cheek by jowl with Jews with similar diagnoses. The Poles interned had not been separated out when the Germans came because they were no more welcome in the New Order than Jews were. Similar patients who had been housed at other facilities were consolidated into Breslaw, if they hadn’t simply been shot.

  Now, a wretched place that had always been crowded was reduced to a mass of stinks and screams. With no soothing medications, little food and no hope of ever being rid of lice or dysentery, it was hard to know who had less hope, the inmates or their watchers.

  Added to Breslaw’s burdens was the need to care for the physically ill. There had always been a small emergency clinic for residents of the area. Now many people had nowhere else to go and Breslaw refused to turn anyone away.

  As Aaron turned the corner past what had once been another bakery and onto Breslaw Street, named for the hospital, he was stopped dead by the sight of at least half a dozen gleaming black vehicles. Cars such as these would hardly have caused comment just a year before, but today there was menace behind their headlights; the growl of their engines keyed fear in those who heard them rev. The sound meant death. The machines carried the Gestapo.

  The Gestapo was Aaron’s worst fear. It was everyone’s worst fear.

  Officially named Section IV of the German occupying authorities, the Gestapo was given the responsibility of quelling dissent within the Reich and conquered territories. Jews were, of course, a threat by the very definition of Hitler’s regime.

  There was nothing else to be but brave. Aaron continued walking toward the hospital, trying to look invisible in plain sight. Just another dark coat with a white armband and blue star. Nothing to catch the eye, nothing to remark on.

  Only the drivers were left in the cars, the back seats were empty, the men who had ridden in them were nowhere to be seen.

  Just keep walking, Aaron told himself, keep walking.

  The granite entrance to the hospital was close, perhaps one hundred meters. Aaron could see the elaborate façade, carved into stone, the many windows, all of them barred.

  Forward, forward. Don’t look at the cars. Don’t not look at the cars. Forward.

  The wind picked at his collar, trying to reveal his face. Aaron wanted to give these men nothing to remember, so he pulled it closer again.

  Aaron was almost surprised when he wasn’t stopped, when he walked past the gleaming Mercedes-Benz without hearing a hard voice call him over. Perhaps the men were more interested in the warmth of the cabins than in a Jewish man walking by himself in the one part of his city that a Jewish man could walk freely.

  The hospital’s massive door didn’t move easily and Aaron felt eyes on his back as he struggled. A few seconds more, a heave and he was inside. A few seconds after that, he wished he weren’t.

  The Gestapo men in their black leather coats were inside the hospital’s arched front hall, along with perhaps a dozen soldiers whose Schmeiser MP40 submachine guns seemed pointed everywhere at once. They looked nervous. A meaty giant, in a leather coat that would have required several cows to make, was talking to a frightened man — a doctor from his once-white coat and tangled stethoscope — who seemed to be denying everything, whatever everything was.

  “I’m sorry doctor,” the giant said in a voice that sounded as if it had never been touched by regret and was as deep as the man was tall. He spoke in German. “A decision has been made. These are hard times. There are great shortages and we all do our part. Every man must give his all to ensure victory.”

  “But how does this get you any closer to your victory?” the doctor asked in his own stilted, schoolboy German. He was as angry as he was afraid.

  “Arbeit macht frei, doctor. Arbeit macht frei,” the Gestapo man said. “Please have everyone ready to be moved to the work camp within one hour.”

  “But many can’t walk Herr Clausewitz!”

  “I’d like to judge that for myself, if you don’t min
d, doctor. Just bring out those you consider ambulatory and we will visit with each of the rest to make an assessment.”

  The hospital’s gray-faced guardian pitched his head down in despair.

  “You know doctor, your skills would be of great use in the work camp, too,” the devil in the black coat said.

  The doctor was broken. He turned to an attendant at his side, who Aaron hadn’t noticed before, and said what he had to in order to begin the evacuation.

  “Thank you, doctor. I’ll leave a few men here to help you. You’ll forgive me if I disappear for a little while to ensure the transports are on their way.”

  The German doffed his hat sardonically and headed for the door, which Aaron was unintentionally blocking.

  “Excuse me,” Aaron muttered, his eyes cast down.

  The German didn’t move past.

  “What did you say?”

  Aaron had spoken in Polish without thought.

  “I’m very sorry, mein herr,” Aaron said in bad German.

  “I’m sure you are,” the Gestapo man growled. “Look at me.”

  Aaron looked. He saw eyes the pale blue of an Arctic dawn. Behind them was nothing.

  “What’s your name, and where do you live?”

  Aaron began to pull his official papers out of his pocket.

  “I have no time for that, or for you! Just give me your name.”

  Aaron considered giving a false name, but if the Gestapo officer changed his mind, Aaron’s papers would betray him.

  “Kaminski,” he said. “Aaron Kaminski.”

  “Kaminski. Good.”

  The Gestapo man turned to the clerk behind him. “Make a note.”

  Then he was gone.

  He left behind mere anarchy.

  There was nothing for it. Aaron burrowed through a mass of people who were running in no obvious direction. It was as if they hoped that motion would save their lives.

  The hospital director was at the center of the chaos. He was trying to give orders to a staff that was looking for direction. Instead, everything was confusion. The man tried to shout but his voice couldn’t cut through the competition.

  A woman who also wore a stethoscope began to shout for him. Her voice would have cut through the hull of a tank far more effectively than the Polish artillery had the year before. She began to bring order to the crowd.

  “Zeitel, take charge of the people on the third floor … Maurice, the second floor … ” She turned to one of the nurses. “Do what you can to help the patients from the medical wing. Use crutches, wheelchairs, roll them out on beds … Whatever you can think of.”

  The nurse apparently demurred because the next thing Aaron heard was, “Do you think they’ll be better off staying here? Didn’t you hear the Gestapo man? What do you think he means by a ‘visit?’”

  The hospital personnel began moving off in the required directions. The female doctor was speaking more softly to people nearer by, trying to organize the evacuation of the main floor. Aaron walked briskly into the circle surrounding her, using his elbows to make progress.

  “Lekarska, doctor … ” was all he had time to say.

  “What the fuck do you want?” she said, barely glancing at him.

  “I’m looking for a policeman who was hurt and was taken here. His name is Martin Gersh.” Aaron kept his gaze level and his tone was calm.

  “So look for him. But I suggest you make it quick. There’ll be no one here in an hour, one way or another.”

  She turned away.

  Aaron tried again.

  “Where are emergency cases treated?”

  “What other kind of cases do you think we have here? Go!”

  The doctor gathered some of her people and was gone.

  All that left for Aaron was a dash down fetid hallways throwing open doors. After only a few meters he realized his task was impossible. A deluge of people was beginning to flow against him. Some hobbled, swathed in blood-soaked bandages. Others were being wheeled out by attendants. Some were so emaciated Aaron had a hard time believing he wasn’t seeing the animated dead. Many of those patients were doubled over with dysentery, wearing shit-stained robes or blankets.

  “Martin Gersh!” Aaron shouted into the din. He wouldn’t give up. “Martin Gersh!”

  All that got him was a few stares. Many of those who passed and pushed him were beyond answering, anyway.

  A few in the crowd were surprisingly well dressed. A woman in what must have been her own wheelchair — it was made of burnished wood — had a fur draped over her. The man attending her may have been her own, as well. He brutally blazed a path for her. But Aaron saw that she hadn’t been able to buy what she needed most from the hospital — her health. She was as pale and thin as any of the others.

  “Martin Gersh!”

  Men, women, a few children. Thank God not many, Aaron thought. There was a separate facility for them. He hoped it was nothing like this.

  As he found himself herded further into the main hall where the staircases converged, Aaron began to see the hospital’s other type of patient. Telltale signs of retardation on faces, limbs that had never grown right, uncomprehending moans. Shaking and rocking; incomprehensible shouting and screaming. It was an immovable wall of madness being struck by an unstoppable force of desperate suffering.

  “Martin Gersh!”

  There was no answer but the noise of the crowd.

  Aaron found himself battered by an endless stream of shoulders crashing into his own — left, right, left, right, sometimes both at once — pushing him closer to the door.

  “Martin Gersh?”

  “Here!” called a voice.

  At first Aaron was unable to spot its owner in the crowd, but after a minute, the speaker became resolved into a bearded man in his forties wearing nearly rimless spectacles. He was neat and smooth. He was reasonably well fed. Aaron was surprised that he hadn’t noticed the man on that basis alone.

  And there was another factor — Aaron knew him, though not by the name Martin Gersh.

  Under the name Tamislaw Jaruzelski, he was a Pole in the import-export business. The importing was made up of trafficking potatoes and other necessities and frills though the walls of the ghetto, working from the Polish side. The exporting came in the form of the people who were occasionally smuggled out either in the hope of escape or just for an afternoon’s work. Those who worked hoped to bring home enough zloty to add an extra bit of bread to a meal of thin soup.

  The two men eyed each other for a second before Aaron forced himself into a quick decision.

  “Martin!” he called out, as if greeting a long-lost friend. Then more quietly, “We need to talk.”

  “I guess we do,” the other man replied heavily.

  Aaron took him by the arm and began pulling him against the crowd, knowing that they would have no trouble finding an empty room as everyone else tried to flee. Aaron quickly realized that as he dragged “Gersh,” the man himself was dragging a leg twisted and covered in bandages soaked through with blood. “Gersh” was leaning on what could only be called a crutch in charity. It looked more like a bent piece of plumbing.

  Now was not the time for mercy, though, and frankly, Aaron didn’t care much about the other man’s pain. He pushed on, through the crowd, which began to thin after only a few steps. In a minute it was possible to see the institutionally dirty white walls again, and finally an office. The two men stumbled inside and Aaron closed the door behind them. The office had a window and a draft came through it. The fog of their breath began to fill the room.

  The man with at least two names propped himself on the desk, trying to find some comfort for his leg, or at least prevent further damage by taking his weight off it. The bluff confidence he had always projected as Jaruzelski was replaced by a twitchiness that was near panic. There was still something central to the man that Aaron had been able to spot in the crowd, but now, “Gersh” looked like a Gersh, not a Jaruzelski. He was Semitic in a way that his alter ego
hadn’t been on the other side of the wall. It was a striking transformation.

  “You’re Berson’s partner?” Aaron asked.

  “I wouldn’t say partner, but we did work together,” the man replied.

  “As Gersh or Jaruzelski?”

  “It doesn’t have to be one or the other, you know.”

  “What should I call you today?”

  “Well, Gersh would make more sense here, I think,” Gersh said.

  “All right. Let’s try it,” Aaron said, reaching for his second cigarette of the day. He offered one to Gersh who looked down at the package, trying to catch a glimpse of the label.

  “What are these? They’re not the ones I sold you,” Gersh said, taking one with a hint of suspicion. “Those were Pall Mall, weren’t they?”

  “I’m glad to say you’re not my only supplier. Otherwise I think I’d be in a little trouble now, what with you nursing that leg,” Aaron said. “And on the wrong side of the wall, too.”

  “Was that why you were looking for me? For a little business?” Gersh asked. “But of course not, you weren’t even looking for me. Or at least you weren’t expecting to find me when you found Gersh.

  “So what is it you do want? I think we may be a little pressed for time here.”

  Aaron acknowledged the point with a nod.

  “Lev Berson is dead,” he said.

  Gersh did not look shocked at the news. In fact, other than a tightening of his perpetual squint, it was hard to see much of a change at all.

  “All right,” was all he said.

  “I’m looking for whoever killed him, and I’ve been told that you were supposed to be with him last night,” Aaron continued.

  “Who told you that?”

  “Your commander, Blaustein,” Aaron said with a certain amount of irony. “Who does he think you are, by the way?”

  Gersh ignored the question, instead asking one of his own.

  “Why are you here, asking about Berson? I wouldn’t have thought a dead Jewish police officer would be high on your priority list,” Gersh said. “Don’t you have anything else to do? Or is business just that bad?”