Well, it did. And as our homely thugs, on the orders of the ghetto authorities, and in the company of hundreds of other Jews, escorted his thirty-year-old wife and their six children (the oldest only nine) towards eternity, Shulem ran out from the crowd. ‘God!’ he screamed into the rooftops. ‘Why?... Tell me why!’
Shulem immediately suffered a fit, collapsed, and died on the spot. Early next morning, a man who claimed to be a seer swore that he had heard, in the middle of the night, the voice of an embodied Tzedakah wailing, ‘I am a widow, a widow, a widow!’ Of course nobody believed him. But as the day showed itself, and the growing light revealed bizarre footprints on the otherwise untouched blanket of snow, our whole backyard fell under the spell of a deep and awesome foreboding.
The Yellow Sniper
Fatek was a born loser. He was a miserable-looking specimen, thin as a swamp reed, with insipid blue eyes and sloppy shoulders, a nose violet from drinking, cheeks as red as hot cinders, and a falsetto voice. His straw-coloured hair had earned him the nickname ‘Yellow’.
Prior to the war, Fatek had spent most of his days in dimly-lit gaming joints, playing poker and assisting novices to master the art, in which he considered himself an expert. At night Yellow would walk about on rubber-soled shoes, like any other noiseless ‘locksmith’. Needless to say, his professional skills made him the local jail’s favourite and most frequent guest.
His lucky break was the war. Not long after the steel helmets marched into our city of the waterless river, Yellow Fatek, in common with many of his hue, conveniently discovered that, at least on his mother’s side, he was one of them. He was accepted as such, and was soon promoted to the role of helping to guard the Jews of the ghetto that had become our prison. Since he had often been arrested for stealing from these Jews, Fatek welcomed the opportunity to show them his brand of payback.
Stationed opposite 40 Zgierska Street — a huge grey building inhabited by dozens of families, and located not far from the footbridge which crossed that street — Fatek positioned himself strategically behind his red-and-white sentry box. From here the skilled thief could pick off his targets carefully, mainly young people who happened to lean out of windows, at a self-imposed quota of six a day. After operating in this fashion for a while, he was summoned to appear before his superiors. Fatek was terrified; he was convinced that he would be punished. ‘Perhaps I overstepped the mark,’ he thought. But instead, to his pleasant surprise, he was rewarded (as rumour had it) with a gilded medal and an increase in pay. ‘Oh my God,’ he murmured to himself. ‘What a wonderful war!’
To avoid being confronted with the brutal reality of a childhood world that existed no more, I never went back to revisit the wasteland our town became. Of Fatek’s fate I learnt much later, from an old neighbour I ran into on the other side of the world. Once the war ended, this man told me, Fatek had gone into hiding. He emerged towards the end of 1945. One night, drunk and disconsolate, he was heard screaming through his open window: ‘Filthy Jews! First you killed the Son of God, and then you killed my war!’ Shortly afterwards a single gunshot rang out — the last shot that Yellow Fatek ever heard.
Yonas Lerer
If someone in our neighbourhood had enquired about Yonas Lerer, he would have been met with a shrug of the shoulders or a blank stare. But if that someone had asked even the smallest child, ‘Where can I find Yonas Shreiber?’ the searcher would immediately have been led to the man who, from his boyhood, had established his home among the pages of the Tanach.
Yonas Shreiber (‘Scribe’), an honoured disciple of the Alexanderer Rebbe, Isaac Menachem (who was gassed in Treblinka in 1943), had a white ghostlike face decorated with a pair of curly pitch-black sidelocks. He was always dressed in a black silk frockcoat and, in accordance with tradition, tied a braided cord around his waist, to divide the upper spiritual part of his body from its lower profane counterpart. Like most devotees, he wore his black trousers tucked into white woollen socks.
Yonas was blessed with a wife and seven sons.
In his free time — that is, when he was not studying — he walked about the streets exhorting people, Jews and Gentiles alike, to be virtuous. ‘Please, please,’ he would urge, ‘for your own and our world’s sake, do good deeds, and keep your tongue from speaking evil.’ At the start of our ghetto life, Yonas was a ray of hope; he saw God’s hand in everything. ‘Don’t despair,’ he pleaded with his fellow Jews. ‘It is all from Him! Bless your troubles, praise the Almighty, and you will hasten the coming of the Messiah.’
But when our enemies did to him what the Babylonians had done to Zedekiah, the last king of Judah — forced Yonas to witness the murder of his sons, having bludgeoned him with the butt-ends of their rifles for asking to be killed first — he became totally disillusioned with his Master’s goodness and wisdom. He abandoned the pages of his once-adored scriptures, stopped speaking to people, and went about his slaughtered world with a cadaverous look in his eyes.
One night, while reciting a tearful Kaddish after his sons, he glanced up and saw the obscene grin of a solitary cloud. He felt a light touch on his shoulder. It was Madness, quietly entering the darkened chambers of Yonas’s heart.
God, it told him, has passed on to you your father’s and your father’s fathers’ misfortunes, a holy inheritance. And so it should be, from father to son, from son to son. To be chosen remains your destiny; it is attested by your children being put to death.
‘So what am I to do?’ asked Yonas Lerer. ‘How am I to live now?’
You are a fortunate man, Madness replied. You have three choices — not everyone is given three choices.
‘What are these three choices?’
The first, my friend, is to forget everything, and exist like a lantern without a light. The second is to remember everything, and convert your heart into a graveyard.
‘And the third?’
The third is, in my opinion, the best of all. Bind the first two choices into one, and walk for the rest of your days like me, in the guise of a man.
Pantomime
Frederick the Great, enlightened ruler of Prussia and a disciple of Voltaire, confronts his costly clergy. ‘If you won’t show me proof that there is a God,’ he says, ‘no more money will be forthcoming into your already fat coffers.’ One of the churchmen steps forward. ‘The Jews!’ he exclaims. ‘Look at everything we’ve done to them through the ages, and yet they’re still around. That, surely, is unequivocal evidence that there is a God.’
Well, some two centuries later, the madman to the west who controlled our world — and who, at moments of violent exultation, believed there was nothing in all creation as splendid as himself — decided, with the acquiescence (for the time being) of his ephemeral partner to the east, to prove the cleric wrong.
The first step was the old device of declaring the potential victim to be vermin, a premise which most of his followers enthusiastically embraced — for it is much easier to squash a bug than another man. The next was to have the victims concentrated in one spot, so that extermination might proceed in an orderly manner. Order, of course, was very much at the heart of the madman’s design. None the less, to furnish the process of ‘in-gathering’ with especial zest, he went out of his way to invert God’s system. Let there be chaos! he shrilled, and there was chaos. On 7 and 8 March 1940, in our city of the waterless river, a horde of his savage heroes embarked on a murderous spree which cost hundreds of Jews their lives. On 1 May the ghetto was sealed off.
One evening, as mother placed our ‘dinner’ before each of us — a steaming dish of water where a lonely potato struggled in vain to avoid its fate — father remarked, mostly to himself: ‘One tries to get to the bottom of things, but it’s all just a running around in circles. History is absurd, events escape the control of reason. Time to withdraw into our own little world if we can.’
Shortly afterwards Ruven Rosen, a pious friend of ours with a glass eye (a memento of his fight for Polish independence in 1918), paid us
a visit. He was barely recognizable. The Germans had ripped off his beard with a kitchen knife — the same indignity suffered the previous year by our neighbour Zilberszac, and an increasingly common occurrence in the streets of our town. Ruven was in dire need of consoling, for he sought some confirmation that what was happening was God’s will. Father refused to accommodate such a notion. ‘A God who is not a good God,’ he declared, ‘is no God at all. If He created man in His own image, why did we turn out so utterly debased?’
As if from a house on fire, Rosen ran out of our room, heartbroken. ‘Blasphemer!’ he screamed as he went. ‘Desecrator!’ Father dashed out after him and, full of remorse, escorted him back. ‘Reb Rosen, please,’ he pleaded. ‘I didn’t mean to offend you. I’m just bitter, like any other Jew these days. But if God willed this, then I cannot and will not forgive.’
Our neighbour fell into an inconsolable stupor. I inspected him out of the corner of my eye. He was clearly in pain, but it also struck me that without his beard he resembled a featherless chook. Father’s razor gaze froze my smile.
That night a gang of thugs torched our synagogue.
Puppet State
A mad state in a mad world, hemmed in between timber boards and barbed wire, like a chicken-coop, and guarded by killers. Though it behoves me to say, that while one might still outwit the latter abominations, one could never conquer the unnavigable sea of hate which the local populace had so deftly dug out around us.
Little Shmulik, our local jester, who while still a boy would be sent to meet his Maker, once asked my father — whom everybody in our yard except myself considered a sage — why his former school friend Jurek, who lived across the fence, refused to respond to his greetings. ‘Well,’ father told him, ‘he wants to be an exemplary member of his stock, so he must above all demonstrate his hatred for Jews; anything less would be suspect.’ I don’t know whether Shmulik understood this answer, but he nevertheless thanked my dad and walked off.
For those of us inside the fence, understanding had come quickly enough. The appointed Jewish ‘king’ of the ghetto, our puppeteer, was Chaim Rumkowski. Industrious, cunning, alert, a man with an arresting appearance who in other times might have been certified for the things he said and did, he could definitely not be regarded as a disappointment to his bosses. For not only did he successfully establish the order desired by his masters in the city of the waterless river; in the process, and much to the liking of his illustrious superiors, he ingeniously mimicked their own state. Chaim even resorted to their own obscene didacticism in embracing the proposition that orderly removal of unproductive elements was conducive to the future of our communal life.
From the very inception of the Jewish ghetto police, his commissars, sergeants and privates, even his fire-brigade, wore special uniforms complete with polished jackboots that imitated the Germans’ terrible footfall. To deepen the dichotomy between themselves and the ordinary ghetto Jew, these scoundrels, mostly former high-school students, would not speak Yiddish but only the Polish tongue. Consequently they considered themselves not just a people apart, but the true aristocracy of Chaim’s cobweb empire — and with good reason. They and their families were generally exempted from the expulsions from their homes; moreover, they lived well, never going hungry in a city that was starving, going instead on recreation leave within the enclave that was our twilight zone.
On one occasion, during an official function for the privileged ghetto elite, as the night reached its intoxicating climax, the regal Chaim — around his neck a silver chain bearing a Star of David — called out to his festive gathering: ‘Gentlemen, I am bound to share with you some important news. The war will soon come to an end, but let me assure you: the Ghetto will continue as before. Of course, at the rate we’re going now,’ he added, ‘there will be a shortage of workers, and as you know, work is our golden passport to life. But I’ve been told that new Jews will be brought in, Jews from all the corners of Europe. And I, my dear friends, with God’s help, will continue to take care of all the citizens of the ghetto, and to protect you all, as I have always done...’
The only defence of the average ghetto-dweller against Chaim and his henchmen’s vulgarity, the one defence of the starving impoverished workers who spat out their lungs over the sewing or textile machines or in the carpentry workshops, was the sarcastic verses and aphorisms which the poet’s lacerated heart sang into posterity.
Behind the wires, by cosy fires,
The scum are singing, united in crime:
‘Let’s drink L’Chaim to our sovereign Chaim,
To juicy roast and a red French wine.’
As daylight betrayed the day, and dusk squeezed its grey smirk against the pane of our workroom, Efraim the Chassid (so called because of his deep religiosity), presser in our tailoring unit, would shake his head. ‘My God, how is it that our common fate has not transcended our differences?’ And then, paraphrasing the opening lines of the Lamentations, he would chant:
How lonely sits the city
of the waterless river.
She that was once great with people
has become like a widow.
She that was a princess among the cities
has become a vassal.
Bitterly we weep in the night ...
Missed Curfew
I got home almost an hour past curfew. Mother was trembling with fear. Father, although engaged in a discussion with our good friend, the ever-starving Mechel Schiff, fixed me with a questioning gaze. I wanted to explain my lateness, but our guest wouldn’t give me a chance: he was an excellent talker, a terrific dialectician, and he was running hot.
‘Language is the physical manifestation of man’s spirituality,’ he declared, raising his voice slightly.
‘I agree,’ answered father, forgetting my indiscretion for the moment. ‘But I am curious as to how you arrive at such a fine postulate.’
Apart from his erudition in philosophy, Mechel was a poet at heart. ‘A mundane explanation may pose some difficulties,’ he suggested, after a considerable delay. ‘It’s hard to articulate because it is buried in one’s subconscious, hidden in the crevices between spoken words.’
How they could debate metaphysical propositions on an empty stomach was beyond me.
‘My dear Mechel,’ said my father, ‘I’m afraid this is all a bit above my head.’ I detected a hint of irony in his voice.
‘Is that my fault?’ said Mechel.
Mother placed before him a dish of hot floury liquid and a slice of bread. Our visitor was overwhelmed with gratitude. The steam rising from this feast masked his tears as he ate — with vigour and a good deal of noise. Finally, wiping his mouth with his dirty handkerchief, he turned his attention to me.
‘And so tell us, young man, what detained you for so long? Was it worth risking your life for?’
We had never had any secrets from Mechel — he was one of us. ‘I attended a meeting of our underground cell,’ I said at once. ‘Our cell leader, Bono, spoke about the hunger in the ghetto, the deaths. We decided to compile a list of all those who have now conveniently discovered that they’re Volksdeutsch.’
Mechel stood up in his seat. ‘There won’t be any retributions!’ he cried. ‘Jews are not a vindictive people. Get it out of your hot heads, it goes against our psyche—’
‘What is our psyche?’ I cut in.
‘A spirit born of a marriage between exile and promise. An ethos born of an eternal Exodus. Jews quickly forgive and forget — little wonder that the Bible repeats the word Remember a hundred and sixty-nine times. Obviously our scribes knew us well.’
At this point father spoke up, doubtless to interrupt Schiff’s homily. ‘So tell me, friend,’ he said, holding up his open palm. ‘Your home is but a shed, you have no wife, no children, not even a relative to speak of. Why didn’t you escape like many of the others — like our heroic government did before the Germans invaded our city?’
Mechel grew suddenly tense, pensive, framing his
response. At last he announced:
‘A city can survive without a king, but not without a fool.’
The light outside had grown dim. We had known that the evening was coming, but now that it had arrived we were thrown off-balance, almost shocked. ‘You can’t risk going back at this hour,’ mother told our guest, ‘I won’t let you. It’s far too late.’
‘What’s more, the yellow sentry is on night duty,’ my father added. ‘You must stay.’
Mechel stayed, and left at daybreak. We never saw him again.
Those Incredible Believers
The city of the waterless river was renowned for its colourful working class, its many political parties and factions, its stormy May Day demonstrations, and the socialist fervour that so passionately guided the Jewish working community in its unshakeable belief that it was an integral part of the one great universal fraternity.
My neighbourhood had good reason to be proud. Though famous for its poverty, it was inhabited by hundreds of gifted artists, singers, musicians and thinkers who had never had the chance to display their skills, along with scores of religious and secular messianic redeemers. I lived in the heart of an iridescent kaleidoscope, a veritable bazaar of diverse people and ideas — the kind of place you would expect to experience only in a storybook. A local wit put it another way: out of the nine thousand denizens of our precinct, at least ten thousand were poets!
Back in 1934, the socialist uprising in Austria and the Schutzbund’s heroic stand against the Fascist forces had converted my street into a raging ocean. From daybreak, crowds gathered around newspaper stands; men forgot their starving families, downed their tools, talked only of joining the bloody fray. As a rain of coins drummed into the tin fundraising dish, Sam Samionov, the local baritone, had clambered on the shoulders of two burly revolutionaries and, in concert with the whole swaying, rhapsodizing clamour, burst into the inspirational song of the moment:
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