by Arnold Zable
Despite its former might, Venice is a brittle city, built upon shifting foundations: mud flats, drained marshes, swamps and sandbars. This enclave and its pockmarked beauty lure me; its grim romance holds me captive. It feeds my obsession with the darker recesses of history. I scribble the key dates and episodes in my notebooks. And this is what I write:
In 1516, the Venetian Republic’s ruling council debated whether Jews should be allowed to remain in the city. The dilemma they faced was this: how to contain the ‘sworn enemies of Christ’ who would pollute their religion, without losing their services as physicians and intermediaries between Christians and Muslims, as traders and as moneylenders, a task they were allowed since Christians were forbidden to charge interest.
Thus the first ghetto was born, in the streets I am now walking. The deal was this: the city’s Jews would be confined to a dirty, polluted island, linked to the rest of Venice by three bridges. The island was the former site of an iron foundry where, in the fourteenth century, metal was cast to make cannons.
By day, the inhabitants, identified by circular yellow badges and yellow scarves, were allowed to ply their trade on the Rialto, but two hours after sunset in winter and one hour after sunset in summer the three drawbridges were raised, the guardian gates padlocked. Guards stood at the gates and patrolled the surrounding canals in boats to ensure that the enemies of Christ would not creep out and contaminate the populace.
The word ghetto derives from this site, from the Italian getto meaning ‘casting’ or from the Venetian, meaning ‘foundry’. Confined within a small space, the inhabitants expanded upwards, building vertical additions, houses up to six storeys high, far higher than buildings in the city at large, with tiny rooms, low ceilings and prayer houses on the upper floors crowned with miniature cupolas, restrained and understated.
‘This is how it is,’ I hear Signor Marcello saying. You want to survive, do not draw attention to yourself. You want to live, make do with what you’ve got. You want to protect your children? You must create a labyrinth of escape routes, secret doors and tunnels, passageways, false walls.
The ghetto was isolated, yet its isolation protected its residents. And they took their chances. They created a mini civilisation, a city within the city, invested it with its own myths, its subtle glories. Some came to see it as a biblical camp of the Hebrews, a miniature Jerusalem, a way stop for scholars and pilgrims. There were five synagogues, one each for the German, Italian, Spanish, French and Levantine communities that settled here, each community with its history of dispossession, its journey in search of a new way to scrape a living.
They made the ghetto a centre of culture, complete with literary salons, an academy of music, a theatre, and a place of commerce with inns for merchants and travellers. The main street was lined with bookshops, second-hand dealers, printing works, pawnbrokers and banks, tailors’ workshops. Venetians were drawn to the district as soon as the gates were unlocked at dawn.
In time the boundary between ghetto and city became more fluid. Ghetto physicians, lawyers, merchants and scholars assumed a prominent place in the daily affairs of the Republic. At night, young men stole out of the ghetto to party in the city. The gates were more easily scaled, the guards more willing to turn a blind eye.
The ghetto’s fortunes rose and plummeted in tandem with the fortunes of Venice. During the 1700s it fell into bankruptcy, mirroring the economic and political decline of the Republic. In 1797, Napoleon’s troops brought an end to the Venetian Republic. The ghetto gates were demolished and in time its residents were granted equal rights. The enclave remained the centre of the Jewish community, its buildings subject to cycles of disrepair and restoration. Then it all ended with the Nazi occupation, the robotic beat of soldiers, herding families onto trains bound for death.
Then I see him. Signor Marcello walks slowly, glances around him, as if not wishing to be noticed. In the sunlight, away from reception, his familiar territory, he looks more aged, less certain. He is carrying a bouquet of yellow flowers. I follow him at a distance. At this hour, the narrow alleys induce a sense of the clandestine, a play of hide-and-seek between sun and shadow. There is a furtiveness about the signor. He steps into the shell-shaped central Campo del Ghetto Nuovo.
Signor Marcello walks the length of the piazza to the memorial bas-relief panels beside the Casa di Riposa building. He pauses from time to time, to catch his breath and his bearing. When he reaches the memorial wall, he lays the flowers at the base of the bronze bas relief depicting the last train bound for annihilation.
He stands, head bowed for several minutes, while I watch just out of his sight. We are alone. The piazza is deserted. The morning rays slink through the side streets and break out into the open. The bronze panels glint in the sunlight.
Signor’s flowers lie by the wall in a blaze of yellow. The rays play upon his polished black shoes. Only now do I become aware of the shift in tempo. The chorus of feet has ceased. The beat is gone, and the rhythm has dissipated. The square is silent.
The Partisan’s Song
They were the first to hear the poem that became the anthem. No one present that day could have known how famous the song would become, that it would be sung by ghetto fighters and by partisans in forest hideouts on the eve of battle, and, to this day, at memorial services of survivors worldwide.
It was in late April 1943 in a dimly lit cellar beneath the Vilna ghetto. There were four present: Phillip Maisel and his twin sister Bella, Meishke, the streetwise union leader, and the poet Hirsh Glik or Hirshke as his friends called him. They were seated at a table, a single candle was burning, and Hirshke read aloud two poems he had recently completed. The first, ‘Quiet the Night’, portrayed the daring exploits of a partisan girl.
The second poem, ‘Never Say’, would become renowned as the partisan’s song, the de facto hymn of the resistance. Bella questioned the words in the first verse. She asked, ‘Why did you use the word poyk? Why, a poyk ton unzer trot, the drum beat of our steps? What does it mean?’
Hirshke did not answer. Once he wrote a poem he never changed a word. The music was yet to come, but those present heard the poems fully formed, word for word as they are sung to this day.
I first heard the partisan’s song as a young boy in the 1950s, performed at a memorial evening as I stood with a community of elders. In fact many were not so old. They ranged in age from about thirty or so, but the stories they carried within them made them seem older. Paradoxically, as the years went by, this conferred upon them a sort of agelessness. The impact of what had befallen them, what they had lived through, remained the constant, regardless of their physical ageing.
The song was sung at the end of the evening, as an anthem. The audience rose to its feet to sing it. From the opening lines the hall resounded with voices. The lyrics were an exclamation, an emphatic statement.
Never say you are on your last way
When blue days are concealed by skies of grey
The hour we have longed for is surely near
With the drumbeat of our steps: We are here!
The song marked the end of the ceremony, an end to lamentations and remembrances. It signalled a transition back to reality. I stood between my elders, dwarfed by their presence, overwhelmed by the raw strength of their numbers, and their lust for survival.
From green palm lands to lands white with snow
We are coming with our anguish and our woe.
And where a spurt of our blood will fall
Will sprout our courage, our unyielding will
Brutal reality and hope alternated in equal measure. Even then I understood that the song was a miracle of poetry: an act of defiance, wrought from a time of terror, yet somehow infused with spirit. Unnerving imagery tempered with lightness.
The morning sun will gild our present day
And our yesterdays will vanish with our foe
Yet if the sun delays and in the east remains
Through generations this song will
be passed on.
By the fourth verse, the anthem appeared endless, and this is how I wanted it. I was a child among fighters, protected and secure in their presence. I was being inducted into their secret. Within this gathering of survivors the bonds remained strong, and the sense of comradeship was palpable.
The song is written with blood, and not with lead
It’s not a song by a bird in free flight overhead
It holds a people trapped between falling walls
The song is sung with weapons in our hands
At some indefinable point, our age differences dissolved and the distinction between generations vanished. I was a part of the collective, an accomplice in an act of restoration. All that existed was a communion of voices submerged in one voice, harking back to the first verse, for a final word, a restatement of purpose.
Never say you are on your last way
When blue days are concealed by skies of grey
The hour we have longed for is surely near
With the drumbeat of our steps: We are here!
By the song’s end, the night had been fully restored to the poets. We filed out of the hall in silence. At this time of year the air was crisp, tinged with intimations of winter. Many of those present lived within walking distance of the hall. Located on the edge of the inner city, the neighbourhood was an intimate enclave where survivors had regrouped and begun the ascent back to normality.
We walked beneath glowing street lamps, past the homes of friends, across median strips planted with palms and poplars, along familiar back lanes with fences shrouded in darkness. We were half a world away from the scenes of the crime, yet on this night we were being stalked by its shadow. We walked the four blocks home in near silence, and if we did speak, we did so in whispers.
Phillip Maisel sits by the lounge-room table on an autumn morning in 2010. He leans towards me, his elbows on the lacquered surface. The previous evening we had sat at the kitchen table late into the night. Now that I’ve heard the bare bones of his story, I am eager to hear it in full.
He is small, but fit and agile for a man of eighty-seven. He pauses from time to time, lifts his head and looks into the distance in search of the memory. His English, which he acquired quite late in life, is precise and measured, with a hint of the syntax of the other languages he has acquired over his lifetime. He selects each sentence with care.
‘Hirshke was a quiet boy,’ he says, ‘very shy, unassuming. And we were friends. It is strange. When you are young you don’t need much to become close friends. We met in 1941 during the Soviet occupation. I will tell you something very interesting. We were very leftish, and this is what brought us together. The story is like this.
‘Before the war Hirshke was living in the poorest part of Vilna, a suburb called Snipiszki. His father was dealing with second-hand clothes and scrap metal. He could not afford a wagon, and did his business on foot. As far as I remember, Hirshke had one sister and two brothers, and they were all musical. They were the poorest of the poor, and their poverty deepened when their father died.
‘When we first met, Hirshke was working in a shop selling stationery. I was also working in such a shop. We were members of the same trade union. We attended meetings every Thursday. I was young and a romantic, and meeting someone who was a real poet was very exciting.
‘In Vilna there is a river called Wilja, and after the meetings we were usually going for a walk on the riverbank. I wrote poetry that was published in a newsletter. So I was some sort of a poet.’ Phillip sits back, folds his arms and laughs contemplating his literary talents.
‘Hirshke was a real poet, but I felt we had something in common in the way we saw life. You may call it strange, but this was the way we saw things. He was expressive, a true artist. He had his own language, his own selection of words that were unique to him.
‘He was about my height, five foot four, and neatly dressed. I see him by my side, strolling by the Wilja. But I do not see the river. I see myself listening, attentive, talking very little. I was learning from him, even though he was just two years older. Yet he was only twenty when we met. He had dreamy eyes, but he was actually more practical than me. He had faced more poverty in his life. I came from a comparatively well-off family.
‘When Hirshke was looking at you, you could see something was happening inside him. He was always thinking, always searching for meaning. This is pure speculation, but I assume he was creating a new poem. I admired him for his ability to express himself in poetry. A poem is like music. It says more than the words that appear on the paper.
‘One of the things I marvelled over, but did not comprehend, was how he was able to create an entire poem in his mind before he wrote it down. He carried it around in him. He allowed it to grow. But once he wrote it down he would never change it, not even one word.
‘Then in autumn 1941 the Germans occupied Vilna and everything changed. They would snatch people in the street and take them to prison, and from there, to be shot in Ponary. It was like this: Ponary was located in the forest on the outskirts of Vilna. When the Russians had occupied the city in the previous two years, they started to build storage facilities in Ponary for oil tanks. They dug deep trenches to house the tanks, but when the Germans took over they used the pits as mass graves for the murdered.
‘The killings started straight away. The Germans were picking up Jews from the streets and taking them to Lukiszki prison and, from there, in trucks to Ponary. When they caught someone in the street it was for one of two reasons: for work, or to kill them.
‘We lived in constant fear. Many thousands were killed before the ghetto was created. That is why some of us were relieved when the ghetto was established. At least there seemed to be a stop to the random abductions, but it did not take long before we realised this made little difference. The murder and the maltreatment continued.
‘For a time I lost direct contact with Hirshke. I was living in a different part of the ghetto. Meishke was our go-between. He had been the secretary of our trade union. He kept up with the members and he always knew what was happening. He was a close friend of Hirshke. There was a rumour he was in love with Hirshke’s sister, who was very beautiful.
‘Who was Meishke? He was a man who lost his father when he was young. His mother had to support the family. He never had a proper suit in his life. He was always wearing second-hand clothes that were a little bit too big, oversized jackets, long trousers. He was very skinny. Before the German occupation he joined the Komsomol, the youth organisation of the Communist party.
‘I will tell you something interesting. His father died well before the war, and to support the family his mother bought and sold chickens. She would walk to a village several kilometres from Vilna, purchase a pair of chickens and return to the city to sell them at the market. She would use the profit she made to feed her family, then she would walk back to the village and buy two more chickens, and so on.
‘Can you imagine such poverty? At a meeting of the Komsomol, a party apparatchik asked, “What is your mother doing for a living?” Meishke told him she sold chickens at the market. “Ah, so your mother is a business woman,” said the apparatchik. “That makes you the bourgeois son of a trader.” Meishke was thrown out of the Komsomol, but he would still come to meetings. No one minded. The rules were set in Moscow, and we were far away.
‘To tell the truth, Meishke did not care. He took things as they came. There was so much injustice in the world it was no surprise to him to find some injustice in the Komsomol. He was not formally educated, but he was very clever, quick-witted and aware of world affairs. He had his own way of seeing things, his own sense of humour.
‘He worked in a food shop during the Soviet occupation. There was a cat that lay in the shop all day, but it could not be left there overnight. Meishke would get him out of the shop by enticing him with the tail of a herring.’ Phillip laughs. ‘I was waiting for him after work and he would be dangling a herring in front of a cat.
; ‘When we were driven into the ghetto, Meishke was the one who knew what was going on. He was a catalyst, the one who brought people together. Through him I would find out what was happening to Hirshke. He told me that he was working in the forests. Hirshke was one of a group of people that the Germans sent from the ghetto to a place called Rzesza to collect turf.
‘You see, turf is formed by decaying vegetation in the swamps and marshes. After many years it solidifies, and can be burned as fuel. Hirshke’s work brigade was cutting it out of the forest floor and letting it dry out. It is very hard work. The turf is full of water, very heavy. They would have to wade in the peat bogs. In Lithuania the climate is cold and wet. Every few months they would come to the ghetto to get some food supplies, and then return to their camp in the forests.
‘Meishke told me when Hirshke was back in the ghetto, and we would meet, at most for about thirty minutes. We were exhausted from work and lack of food. We were all starving. We lacked basic necessities. We used newspaper to make a fire in the woodstove to cook our meals. I would meet Hirshke in the street and have time only for a quick conversation. We talked about who was alive, who had died and who had joined the ghetto underground.
‘At our places of work, members of the resistance tried to find things that could be used as weapons. I was working in a garage where I learned to be an automotive electrician. I managed to scavenge flexible steel coils that had been used to protect the truck ignition systems. We thought perhaps we could use them to fight the Germans.
‘One meeting with Hirshke was a special occasion. He said, “I have just written two poems. I want to read them to you.” So we went to the cellar under the building where I was living, or shall we say, existing. There was nowhere else to go; we were crowded into every little space, in tiny rooms, in attics and garrets.
‘The cellar entrance was inside, not far from the stairway, hidden by bricks. After the ghetto was established we called the cellars bunkers. The four of us went down together. We lit a candle, sat at the table and Hirshke read the poems.’