by Unknown
Lying next to Moze in the dark, I wiped my suddenly wet eyes on my arm.
“Do you still have dreams of them? The … people?” I asked. He shuddered and pressed his hands against his eyes.
“Oh yes. Last night I saw a place, a terrible place where men like skeletons lined up, ten and twelve rows deep, behind a barbed wire fence. They were naked, weak and filthy, and covered with lice. Their fingers, more bone than flesh, curled around the rusted wire fence. Their eyes were just empty sockets in their sunken gray faces. Towering flames rose up behind them, licking the night sky. They stood motionless as the flames moved closer and closer. I screamed at them to move, to get away from the fire, but they stared past me into the blackness behind me. Then, as the fire overtook them, they opened their mouths and cried ‘Arbeit macht frei’ as one.” He blew his breath out in a long sigh.
My mouth was dry. “Do you know what that means?” I whispered.
I knew no German words that did not refer to food.
“Work will make you free,” he replied with a heavy sigh. “I don’t understand it either.”
Moze tried hard, but he never seemed to get the hang of being a soldier. The first time he fired his rifle, he dropped it because he was shaking so hard. When we practiced bayonet charges on the straw dummies, he would hesitate. Then Sarge would yell at him, and he would stab half-heartedly and apologize. To a dummy, no less. Grenades, howitzers and ack-ack guns made him shrink into himself like a kicked around stray mutt. Yet it wasn’t like he was scared. For himself he had no fear, and he kept up with the rest of us in every way. It was just that if he was doing something that could kill someone, he could barely bring himself to do it.
“Moze, it’s only Krauts and Nips, and you know damn well they’d kill you as soon as look at you,” I said.
“Don’t you see, Ben? That’s the problem. To us they’re only Krauts and Nips. To them we’re just kikes and Yids.”
“And Yankee bastards,” I said.
“There is a part of me that wants to kill, but I know that will not help. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth just doesn’t make it all right anymore. I think that evil does not stop evil, it just creates more and more. And killing is evil, Ben, no matter who does it.”
“But what about the dreams, Moze? You’re here because of them. You wanted to come and fight.”
“The dreams still come every night, and every morning I wake up crying with the desire to help them. I wish that the Lord would create a Joshua to blow down the walls, or an army of Golem to crush them all.”
“A Golem?”
“A Doppelganger, a superhuman man. There are stories about them in the mystical texts. You shape them from clay as the Lord did Adam. I have read the secret prayers in the Kabbalah and the Zohar that can bring it to life.”
“Moze, that’s pretty hard to believe—don’t you think?” He looked at me sorrowfully.
“I know it makes no sense, that it’s meshugganah talk. But I can’t help it. I have to believe it, or my soul is forfeit.”
After boot camp, we were given a short leave before going overseas. We all went home except for Moze. I told him to come home with me, that my parents wouldn’t mind, but he wanted to stay on base. I went home to Rosedale, and my family acted like I was a hero even though all I’d done was survive Basic. It was probably better that Moze didn’t come home with me—I was visited by all of all my aunts and uncles and cousins, my bubbe and zaydeh, to see how handsome I looked in my uniform and how brave I was. Oy vey, all the questions, the conversations, the noise, the hugs and kisses—and the tears—made me feel funny inside. And they were my family.
I was to be posted to the Pacific. So much for my triumphant march on Berlin. Now the enemy was Tojo and his suicide-crazed soldiers and pilots. Moze was shipped off to Europe. In an unusually intelligent move by the Army, Moze was not assigned to the front but worked behind the front lines, in supply and logistics. Me, I was not so lucky.
We wrote back and forth for a while, but as the fighting in Europe got more intense, his letters stopped. I decided it had to be a problem with the mail. I couldn’t let myself think about the other reasons why I hadn’t heard. But I thought of him often, especially on Shabbat and at night, in the tents and the foxholes, when I longed for a good story to take me away from the heat and the bugs and the fear.
Late in ’44, as the Allies tightened the noose around Germany, the existence of the Nazi death camps was finally and dreadfully confirmed. Horrible stories were told of emaciated bodies stacked like so much cordwood by the rows of crematories. Gold extracted from teeth and melted down for jewelry. Hair used to stuff mattresses. Skin tanned to make lampshades. And the gruesome, inhuman experiments on the children. I was sick with anger and revulsion. And I remembered Moze and his dreams.
When I read of how the Soviets liberated Auschwitz and the slogan on the gate—Arbeit Macht Frei—I wrote to Moze again, begging him to answer. While I waited for a reply, V-E Day came to Europe. I didn’t pay much attention because my war was still on. A couple of weeks later, just before I shipped out to Okinawa, Moze himself arrived in Leyte.
He was changed. He seemed taller and thinner than I remembered, bent as he was under the weight of his pack. There was no more babyroundness to his face, which was etched with pain. His skin was grey, and his dark eyes were flat and empty. I gasped when I saw how he looked now—and the eyes, the look in them, sent a shudder along my spine. But I was very glad to see my old friend. I was not so glad a few minutes later, when I found out that he was going to the front with me. I was worried about what Moze might do in the face of the Nips’ resistance. He already looked shell-shocked, a haunted man.
That night, we talked as we had back in boot camp. “So, it was all true then? The dreams?”
“Yes, Benjamin. All true and worse. Much worse. Entire shtetls, whole villages, just wiped out. Families gone. Worlds gone. My unit was sent to a small camp in Germany, to help feed and clothe the survivors. It was nothing like Auschwitz, but … oh, the stench of the place. It got onto your clothes and skin, in your hair and lungs. The smell of shit and puke and death, Ben. The survivors were men and women, more dead than alive. Zombies. They told us that when the SS knew that the Americans were coming, that they would be found, they had all prisoners dig a big hole in the ground. Then they lined them up with the children, all around the edge, and shot them and threw them into the pit. Then they set the bodies afire before they ran like dogs. The handful still alive were only those who ran and hid, or were too starved and sick to work.”
I trembled in the dark, knowing there was worse yet to hear.
“I stood at the edge and looked down into the pit. I looked at the bodies, the burned flesh, the arms and legs twisted and black. Then I ran from the camp, down into the village nearby. I grabbed the first man I saw. A fat German grocer who smelled of sauerkraut. It didn’t matter if he was a member of the Nazi party or not. I punched his ugly face. Broke his nose. I screamed ‘Didn’t you know? Didn’t you know that they were murdering people up there? Couldn’t you see it? Couldn’t you smell it?’ Ben, the town was less than a mile from the camp. They smelled the ovens and heard the screams even if they were afraid to come and look. But he shrugged and he said it was none of his business what they were doing at the camp.” Moze was silent for a few moments. Then he spoke, softly.
“I shot him. Right between his eyes.” I could not speak.
“My C.O. could have had me court-martialed. Instead, he sent me here. Maybe it was because I told him my only friend was in the Tenth Army, and I needed to be with you. Because you understand.”
“Understand what?” I asked, my voice thick with tears.
“When we got here and I saw with my own eyes the hate and the horror of what had been done to these wretched souls, whose only crime was to have been born Jew or Romany, I screamed and cried and called God every vile name I could think of. ‘You have forsaken me and my people after I devoted my life to you! You
let this happen! You are not God!’ I wept for the dead—for the piles of starved bodies tossed away like so much garbage or just lying where the SS had shot and them before they ran. And I wept for myself, for all the hours spent reading Torah and Kabbalah, for the family I gave up, and for the faith I had so blindly followed.”
Moze’s voice was almost flat, his eyes cold in the moonlight.
“But I believe, still. I have to have faith, or I am no better than the soulless creatures who wreaked this terrible evil on the world. Ben, you have faith too. That is how you understand. That’s why I am here.” His words, said so matter-of-factly, made me angry. By this time I had pretty much given up on God unless I was pinned down by fire, or watching a kamikaze plane heading right for one of our ships. I didn’t believe in anything but dumb luck anymore, and counted on nothing but myself.
“Faith, schmaith.” I said. “I don’t believe God gives a damn about us or this war or anything. The age of miracles is long gone.”
Moze stared at me. His unblinking eyes held mine until finally I had to look down.
“You’ll see,” he said coldly.
He rolled himself up in his bedroll and turned his back to me.
Places have rhythms, a music of their own. In the synagogue, it’s the guttural chant of the Hebrew prayers. In a city like New York, it’s the sound of the El, the honk of the cabbies, the click and scuff of feet on the sidewalks, the grinding roar of the buses. Down the shore in Jersey, you have the rolling crash of the surf, the fragmented melodies of a hundred radios tuned to different stations, the screams of the little kids playing in the water, the cries of the gulls.
War has no rhythm. It’s either total boredom or total insanity. No middle ground. You can count off the boredom with cigarettes and conversation, but then the world explodes and you find yourself on the express train to hell.
When the first wave of Marines came ashore at Okinawa, there was no resistance. The Nips had vanished. Not until we began pushing inland did we find them. They had built pillboxes into the hills, and fortified caves. They rained bullets and mortar fire down on us, and the only way we could get them out was to take each cave, one by one, with flamethrowers and grenades. It seemed like every man, woman, and child was armed and willing to die for the Emperor.
Moze and I were sent in as reinforcements, replacements for the Marines killed and wounded. When we joined up with a unit pressing on toward Shuri, where the fighting was fierce, we dug in at the bottom of a ridge under a banyan tree. The weather had gotten bad. It rained buckets, and the island was nothing but a sinkhole of mud. I thought the tree might protect us from the rain. I looked over at Moze, resting on his shovel.
He’d barely spoken to me since that first night. I had lived through the hell of Leyte Gulf, with the kamikaze attacks, and I figured we had a pretty good chance of dying here on Okinawa.
And I also figured it was a hell of a thing, to come this far to die. As I turned over another shovelful of mud, I decided it was time to make my peace with Moze.
“Moze, I’m sorry about the other night.”
He turned and stared at me with those dead, dark eyes.
“It’s just that, well, I guess I do believe. A little.” I chose my words carefully, trying to be tactful.
Moze kept staring at me, but as I spoke, his eyes began to shine. Then he laughed and clapped me on the back. “I knew you’d come to understand! Wait, Ben, and have some faith. By this time tomorrow, you will be dancing under this tree, laughing with joy.”
I grinned at him, but fear clutched my bowels again. Here I was, in a foxhole, facing the desperate and vicious Nips with a crazy man for my buddy. Oy vey izmeer, as my Pop used to say.
The shelling that came down on us from high on the ridge that night was heavy. Bullets shredded the leaves of the tree overhead and blasted chips of wood off the trunk and branches. Explosions lit up the perimeter with flashes of blinding white light, and the air was filled with acrid smoke and screams. Moze and I fired our guns at the bunker about halfway up, our designated target. Suddenly Moze stopped firing and leaped from the foxhole.
“What in God’s name are you doing?” I shouted. “Get down, Moze. They’re going to kill you!”
He paid no attention to me as he ran out into the muddy clearing in front of the foxhole.
“Watch, Ben! I will dance and pray, all the secret prayers from the Kabbalah! I will dance and call out the Shma, Yahweh’s secret name. I will dance and pray and share the mysteries with you, and then you will dance, too, just as I promised. Finally, this endless killing will stop!”
“Moze, please! For the love of God, get back here before you get killed!”
But he ignored my frantic pleas.
“Baruch atah Adonai, eloiheynu melech ha’alom,” he screamed, shaking his fist at the nest of Japs firing down on us. Then he began to chant, swaying back and forth from the waist, praying. His feet churned the mud, splashing a counterpoint to the whine of the bullets, the rat-atat of machine guns, the explosions of grenades.
I was beyond terror, waiting every second to see my friend blown apart in front of my eyes. My friend, who apologized to dummies back in boot camp, was committing suicide. Over and over, I yelled at Moze to get back into the foxhole until my voice broke, and I was shrieking like a girl. The Japs were lobbing grenades at us, and all I could do was fire blindly up the hill and watch my friend as he swayed and chanted and danced in circles, lit up in the strobe flashes of gunfire, wreathed in smoke from all the ordnance exploding around us.
I suddenly realized that the bullets were hitting Moze. They made a wet, thudding noise as they hit his body, a whistling clang as they ricocheted off his helmet. His dance became a frenzied spinning, his prayers a terrible song. He fell to his knees and stretched his arms to the sky. A bullet carried off two of his fingers; another took off a piece of his chin.
There was nothing but the howling hell of war around us. The world, including me, had gone mad in swirls of smoke and flame and noise and death. Moze was being shot to pieces out there, and he was still dancing. I could only sit in the foxhole and watch and scream.
All at once Moze stood up, sprinted to the foxhole, and grabbed his rifle. Pointing it at the sky, he let loose round after round. Then he turned on me, brandishing the weapon in my face. I stared back. Half his face was gone, carried away by the Nip slugs, but his eyes burned brightly under his helmet.
“Why aren’t you dead?” I whispered. “You should be dead.”
I dropped my rifle and crouched down like a dog in the mud at the bottom of the foxhole. Moze scared me more at that moment than I’d ever been scared before—or since. I stared up into the barrel of my friend’s rifle, the beckoning finger of Death twitching for me. If the Lord had seen fit for millions of Jews to die in the German death camps, why would He bother with a meshugganah Hasidim and his friend? I waited for the white-hot pain that would end my short life.
“Benjamin, where is your faith?” Moze asked in his sad quiet voice. And I heard him so clearly, above all the fury of the battle.
A grenade exploded not ten feet away from us. The force of the blast was stunning when it slammed into me. The banyan tree crashed down on top of the foxhole, and onto my head. I sank down into a deep, gray void.
When I came to, Moze was lying face down in the mud. My friend had lost his family, his sanity, and finally his life. I had been spared by the falling of this shrapnel-scarred banyan tree. Guilt washed over me, and a desire to avenge Moze pushed me out of the foxhole.
Climbing up through the shattered tree, I staggered to my feet, my ears bleeding and my head pounding.
“NO!” I shouted. I raised my rifle and began firing madly, aiming into the flashes from the Nip guns up on the ridge. I kept firing until the clip was empty. Then I pulled a grenade from my belt, took the pin out with my teeth, and threw it toward the pillbox. The noise of the explosion was deafening, the smoke thick and hot. My throat, already raw from yelling, burned as
I gasped for air. Finally, after lobbing two or three more grenades, there were no more flashes.
I spun around and faced the lump on the ground that was my friend a moment or two ago. I fell to my knees beside Moze, to embrace him. But my arms encircled nothing but mud. His body was gone. Unbelieving, I felt frantically around in the black muck, trying to find him. My fingers closed on a scrap of paper, but that was all. I clutched it and kept searching, moving in circles, plowing the mud with my hands.
“Medic!” I cried in my broken voice. “Medic!”
I don’t know how long I searched for Moze. Bullets whined around me. Grenades exploded fifty feet away, a hail of dirt and metal rattling down on my helmet. I fought off the gray mists that were rolling over me, in a frenzy now to find him, widening my circles in the mud until I passed out again.
Just before my mind went away, I remembered to slip the paper in my pocket.
I finally regained full consciousness a few days later on the hospital ship. I had a bad concussion, ruptured eardrums, and a nasty shrapnel wound in my left leg, but—miraculously—no bullets had hit me.
“Where’s Moze?” I asked the nurse.
“Moze who?” she replied, looking at me curiously.
Nobody had ever heard of Moishe Abramowicz. But a lot of people had heard of me. Seems as though I single-handedly took out a company of Nips who were hunkered down on the ridge that night. My unit would have been slaughtered if I hadn’t blown their cozy little nest all to hell. I was a hero. Mazel tov.
I tried to explain that I wasn’t alone, that Moze had been there, but it did no good. I guess they thought I had shellshock or battle fatigue—they call it post-traumatic stress disorder now—and they let me rave on about my imaginary friend.
I received a Purple Heart. I couldn’t even look at it. But later I did look at the muddy scrap of paper I found that night. It was the Shma—the secret name of God. I put it in the box with the Purple Heart.