by Jason Fields
Aaron understood. Levinsohn wasn’t the egomaniac he’d first assumed. He was simply mad. Whether or not he’d been destined for that fate all along, what the rabbi had seen over the last months had caused a complete psychotic break. Of course he would cooperate with the Germans, they were carrying out God’s will on earth, serving the messiah himself, though they may not have known it.
“How did you come up with this arrangement?” Aaron asked.
“I went to the Judenrat. Mordechai Zimmerman told me that Hermann Clausewitz was the person to speak to regarding my status in the ghetto.”
“That’s a terrible joke!” Aaron said. “He told you to go right to the Gestapo? You must have really annoyed him.”
Levinsohn continued, oblivious.
“While my first note didn’t reach him, a second one did. I found him a man of understanding, even if not a Jew. He understands God’s plan as I explained it to him. He is another instrument of the Lord’s justice.”
“And what exactly did you promise Clausewitz?”
“I promised him nothing! I provided him with names of those who had already been condemned by God for their resistance to his judgment on the Jews,” Levinsohn said.
“You mean people who wanted to fight back against the Germans?”
“Some ‘patriots’ approached me,” the rabbi said with a sneer. “They asked if I would help.”
Aaron wondered if any of them had been his backers, the men who had put up the treasure to buy the guns. Could it have been that by confronting the rabbi, rather than blindly carrying out his will, Lev Berson had inadvertently tried to protect Aaron and his friends — even died doing so?
He took a breath to calm himself before asking the next question.
“So why are you still here? You may have noticed, the ghetto’s empty. Shouldn’t you be on your way to Jerusalem by now?”
“Soon. There are still some here who are planning to fight the Germans. I am a figure of trust and respect among our people. They will tell me everything I need to know.”
“And you’ll just pass it along,” Aaron said. Something then occurred to him.
“What about your families? You mentioned the ten men in this building. Surely your families are coming with you.”
“Sacrifices have had to be made,” the rabbi said solemnly. “Some have been dreadful. Without certain knowledge of the Lord’s will, I don’t know if I could have made them.”
Aaron snapped. He jumped from his seat and was on the point of leaping at the rabbi when he saw a small German gun in the old man’s fist. It was a Walther PPK, used mainly by police and Nazi Party officials.
“Don’t move,” the rabbi said. “Put your hands up.”
In spite of the tension, or maybe because of it, Aaron let out a sharp bark of laughter. The old man sounded like a gangster in a movie. Was it possible the rabbi went to the movies? Aaron couldn’t quite picture him sitting in the dark, reading the subtitles of an American crime drama.
“Do you know anything about guns?” Aaron asked.
“I know where the bullets come out.”
“Did Clausewitz give it to you? Show you how to use it?”
“I don’t need lessons.”
Aaron reached over and casually grabbed the gun from the rabbi. It wasn’t that Levinsohn hadn’t pulled the trigger. The gun simply hadn’t gone off.
“You should have gotten a lesson,” Aaron said. He leaned across the desk and jammed the gun painfully into the rabbi’s neck. He pressed it a little harder with each passing second.
The rabbi gasped, his blue eyes wide. The old man was in pain, but most of all, he was scared. Scared enough to wet himself.
Aaron appreciated that.
“Want to know what just happened?”
The rabbi was too terrified to move.
“You’re a fucking rabbi. That’s what just happened. And I’m a trained fucking soldier.”
Aaron pulled the gun back into the rabbi’s line of sight and pointed to it.
“See here? This little switch is called a safety. You have to turn off a safety before the gun will fire. That’s why it’s called a safety; it keeps you safe from yourself.”
Aaron toggled the little switch.
And pulled the trigger.
Again, the gun didn’t go off.
“God damn it!” Aaron yelled, thoroughly disgusted with himself. Of course it wouldn’t fire. What kind of Gestapo officer would give a Jew a loaded weapon?
A smile began to spread across the rabbi’s face.
The butt of the gun removed it. Another blow cracked the man’s skull, but Aaron didn’t stop. It wasn’t long before the rabbi looked a lot like Berson had when Aaron first found him.
The door rattled behind Aaron. He turned and threw it open, knocking Avraham to the floor. Blood began to well from the young man’s nose, quickly covering his face.
Good, Aaron thought, now he looks just like the messiah.
He laughed again. It was the kind of laugh that kept the other men in the room out of his way.
As he reached the door of the shul, he could hear a keening that made him think of all the women he’d heard holding their dead children. He cursed the men making it.
Aaron set off toward his apartment. He could think of nowhere else to go in the fading light. Catching a glimpse of his red-stained coat in a window, he stopped to casually remove it and turn it inside out. He nodded to the cadaverous man he saw in the glass, reminding himself to take extra care on the walk home in case any of the fresh blood still showed.
Epilogue
Aaron hiked in clean air, a walking stick clutched in his right hand, the haversack over his shoulders full with stolen food and clothes.
He was fat by no means, but he was a good thief and the proceeds had helped him regain some weight. That, and the help of kind strangers who had fed him well over the weeks he’d trekked across the countryside.
Many had never known that he was a Jew, supposing him to be one of the hundreds of thousands who had been displaced by the war against the Germans and the Soviets and then the Germans against the Soviets.
Others had figured it out, though he didn’t know how. He looked no more like a stereotypical Jew than he ever had. Light hair, blue eyes and a tall frame. He traveled using Stefan Kaczynski’s identity papers.
Still, people had guessed, and it seemed as if the German lust for Jewish blood had served to calm the rampant anti-Semitism in so many Polish hearts. Aaron had found sympathy and gentle questions about his family.
The answer was that Aaron couldn’t, and so didn’t, think about them. His father was gone, his mother had died long before the Germans came. There had been cousins and an aunt, but they were gone, too, as far as Aaron knew. If the war ever ended with the Nazis out of Poland, he would dig graves for them, even without their bodies. He would do the same for Stefan Kaczynski.
Kaczynski was seldom far from Aaron’s thoughts, and if one could feel gratitude toward a man you had killed with your own hands, Aaron did.
Aaron didn’t tell the people who helped him much of his own story. Instead he told them about the dissolution of the ghetto. Of the starving children who had been shot by monsters in front of their own parents. Of the children who had watched their parents die.
The people he told nodded and said they understood, and that there had been atrocities in every town the Nazis had passed through.
No, they didn’t understand, but Aaron thought it was better for them that way. He wasn’t sure he could truly convey what he’d seen, felt, or heard, anyway.
During his months-long walk he heard about the final uprising in Miasto. It was a pale thing compared to what would later take place in Warsaw’s ghetto, but Aaron hoped that the few rusty guns he’d scrounged over the months had seen service.
He felt guilty that he hadn’t been there to fight. He could have found ammunition for the little gun he’d taken from the rabbi who thought he was the messiah. Even if he’d fail
ed to do that, a broken bottle or a brick would kill someone just as well. If he’d taken out one German soldier, it would have left one fewer to kill Jews.
But in the end, Aaron hadn’t wanted to stay or fight. He knew that any victory the uprising could achieve would be pyrrhic, without a guarantee history would even hear of it.
And, somewhat to his surprise, he wanted to live.
So, he had slipped into his old room in the district on the day the rabbi died, gathered what little he had, and left the ghetto the way he’d come in. The basement corridors were only slightly darker than the night outside; the books in the central hall were just as burnt as when he’d left them.
No one bothered him as he walked up the stairs and onto the streets of the Aryan side. He was too numb to look furtive, so maybe the guards thought he belonged there. Maybe they were just looking the other way.
Aaron knew there would be other times and places to fight. He knew there was armed resistance scattered throughout Poland. If he found it, he would join. If he didn’t, he thought he might join the Soviets, though he wasn’t sure they were the lesser of any evils.
But that was a decision he could make later.
Ahead, Aaron saw the outline of the little house he’d come too far to find. At this distance there was no way to see the little sign that he knew was still above the door: Gradno.
Closer to the cottage, the dirt road turned to mud. With each step it became harder to pull his feet from the muck he’d created, until he couldn’t move at all.
In an instant, he became convinced that he would drown in the bodies and the blood and the terror. Drown in what he had done and what he’d been unable to do. Be swallowed up by he people he’d lost and those who he hadn’t saved. Die just as those he’d killed.
The moment passed, though not forever.
Aaron looked down and saw the dirt under his boots was now strewn with pebbles and dry. He began to walk again, toward the little cottage and, he hoped, Yelena.
About the author
Jason Fields is a writer and journalist. He has worked for publications including The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Associated Press.
His mother, Susan, was born to a Jewish family in Belgium in 1940, just as the Nazi’s were invading the country. She, along with her parents, fled across Europe, eventually catching a ship for the United States.
Jason grew up with stories of the family’s flight, and of the world and people that were left behind. This book is an attempt to honor them.
Jason lives with his wife and son in New York City, where he was born.