A momentary evasion: perhaps it is she who needs it. Maybe he, the Soviet officer, can be the audience who listens, the one who can embrace her and say, ‘I was there; I know and I believe you.’
My mother is right. When I was born she was disappointed, not now that she loves me, but for a single second, when the nurse told her that her second child was another son. My mother was right; she should have had a daughter, then I would have known what to do now.
‘Among 1380 people, one family survived by chance. They were Leo Krochmal and his wife Rosa who witnessed the shootings.’
That was the sentence. Handwritten in Russian, dated 9 March 1945, and signed by the People’s Investigator on behalf of the ‘commission for investigating the atrocities of the German Fascist invaders and their accomplices in the Bołszowce District of the Stanisławów Region’.
It does not even mention the daughter.
My mother; Bołszowce’s gravedigger.
Another groan, followed by a yawn, and then, ‘What time is it in Israel? I couldn’t sleep last night. I had to take a sleeping tablet at four in the morning. Call me back in an hour.’
XXV
He is bouncing on a steel dial dug into the earth as if it were a trampoline.
‘Tateh, tateh, turn it,’ he imitates the sound of a young boy who urged his ageing father to weigh the barrel before sending it up the furnace. My father crouches on his knees while twirling on the scale.
‘Our life depended on its weight. If it wasn’t overflowing, full to the top—finished! They would shoot us down. That’s exactly what happened to the father. They shot him in front of the son.’
He grabs a corroded barrel attached to four wheels designed to glide along the tracks criss-crossing this grassy terrain. He pushes but it refuses to give way.
‘This we would push,’ he says, pointing to the barrel and the tracks as if it were a playful object, a Lego railway set to be propelled by an infant’s force.
‘It was loaded with raw iron. All day, we would carry the barrow to this spot here. It had to be full. Then we spun it around, here on this circle, and pushed it to the bottom of the wielki piec.’
They were two Polish words which my father had not forgotten: Wielki Piec—the ‘Great Furnace’, the flagship of Starachowice’s metal works industry linked to the network of plants usurped after the outbreak of war by the Braunschweig Stahlwerke Company. As early as 1940, the labour exchange of Starachowice had demanded 100 Jews to be requisitioned daily at this site for labour.
The furnace looks like a futuristic setting, even though its technology is now obsolete. It is a tower composed of steel bars which bear upwards toward an immense container. My father explains the process of the smelter as if he were guiding prospective buyers through his clothing factory:
‘We never went up the furnace. As soon as we finished we had to run to get our new load. “Schnell”, or else they would beat us. “Full”, or else another beating. I was good at my work. I was young, but I was still good. You had to be strong to survive. Or else, finished you were.’
He says it with pride as he looks up at the majestic tower. The pride seems misplaced; the pride of a slave who has pleased his cruel master. Or is it the pride of survival, of freedom through work, using his boyish muscles and his unflagging persistence?
‘Once I got sick,’ he says, reading my thoughts, ‘and they would have killed me only the Jewish foreman arranged to place someone else on my shift.’
It is difficult to imagine my father enslaved in physical toil. He is a man close to seventy, soft and fleshy. His stomach, fattened by Sabbath stew and stuffed chicken, is held up by a belt hanging loosely from creaseless trousers. Lying on a couch after one of these meals, he will fall into a light snooze, and his stomach will rise up and down as if the featherless chicken limbs are dancing in his innards. It is his stomach I always notice, never his muscles, never his arms which hang limply from his side.
‘The worst days of my life,’ my father reflects. ‘At least this was one furnace they didn’t throw Jews into.’
More than four thousand Jews had been deported from his market-square to their deaths, a minute portion of the 337,000 Jews from the Radom District who shared the same fate in the autumn of 1942. The only Jews remaining by the end of the year were dispersed amongst a collection of Jewish labour camps, ‘employed’ in metal works, glass factories, ammunition plants, tanneries and saw-mills. In Starachowice, there was still truth to the notoriously deceptive slogan which my father would encounter two years later in Auschwitz: Arbeit Macht Frei—‘Work Makes Free’. Freedom for those who did not succumb to epidemics or the punishments of the German and Ukrainian camp guards.
He tours his workplace for over one hour, striding across its perimeter more than once to recapture details. He practises ringing on a bell whose sound announced a new load to be sent into the bowels of the fiery monster; its peal echoing across the landscape of his past.
‘What for did you bring me here?’ he finally erupts. ‘What for?’
In later weeks he would repeat the refrain, complaining that his tranquil nights had surrendered to black images of molten iron, ‘bubbling like porridge’, while a little boy, no younger than he, cries, ‘Tateh, Tateh.’
The memories were always broken like fragments of sacred tablets.
‘All night I tried to remember the little boy’s name, but all I could remember was the face.’
‘Was I on the morning shift or the afternoon?’
‘Was the camp on the lower or the upper part of the cliff?’
‘Did we break for food? How much did the loads weigh? Which direction was it back to the camp?’
There was still one missing piece from the puzzle of his two-year bondage at the Great Furnace. It required a car to transport us to the site, even though he had made this trip at least twice daily on foot.
‘Could be,’ he mumbles, a sign that he was tugging at his memory like a kite pulling in the opposite direction. ‘Could be, but there’s nusink here.’
Nothing. Where were the barracks of the Majówka camp which had housed between 3000 and 6000 prisoners until its liquidation in July 1944? The camp was located on a cliff near the Starachowice orphanage, and isolated from the life of the city by a fence reinforced with barbed wire. On the eastern edge of the camp the cliff face dramatically dropped into a water-hole in which the sewage waste and executed prisoners were discarded.
A point in the distance has caught my father’s eyes. He paces toward it. At the edge of the empty site is a cliff which prevents him from walking further. ‘If not for this hill here, I would remember nusink. This place could be a carpark, but not my prison.’
I know the story which has jolted his memory, exactly as he once related it to me:
I had to go down a hill. It was late in the afternoon and I picked up the wires to escape. A friend from my barrack had given me a letter to take to a Pole in Starachowice; on foot it was only twenty minutes away. It was more dangerous outside the camp than inside: informers, curfews, guards everywhere. I had a hat and I hid the letter underneath. So I first went to the Pole and gave him the letter and he swapped it for another one which I also put in my hat. I then went to a bakery, it was near the synagogue where I used to pray, and I found about fifty rolls which I stuffed in my pockets, in my trousers, in the arms of my jacket. I looked like a bagel shop. By the time I got back to the camp it was late at night, dark, but I couldn’t climb up the back way from the cliff. I had to go the front way, and for three hours I waited for the guards to change. I jumped in under the wire fence but the guards caught me, shook me, and all the rolls fell out from my clothes. They were laughing. I wasn’t. I thought I was finished. ‘Where have you been?’ they asked. I lied; told them I was in the kitchen. But they knew that the kitchen didn’t have nice rolls like these. They took the rolls anyway, and the letter from under my hat, and said they’ll punish me tomorrow. I ran and told my friend what happened, the one who gave me t
he letter: he was more scared than me. He arranged for a relative in the camp who worked in the kitchen to give the Ukrainian guards vodka, and that night they got completely drunk. Must have bribed them with money too. I was saved. The next morning they only warned me: ‘Next time we’ll kill you.’ Only there wasn’t a next time. I never went near that hill again.
Until now. He is leaning forward on his toes, peering down the rocks and the moss.
‘They used to throw the dead bodies down there,’ he informs us as he steps back, fearful of tumbling over the cliff onto the splintered bones. ‘I was lucky; me they only beat. Once, when they were cleaning the oven, I was taken to work at the Strzelnica camp where my brother was working.’
‘Julag 1’— the Jewish labour camp situated in the Strzelnica area, was established in October 1942 as a prison for more than 8000 Jews enslaved in the armament factories of the Hermann Göring Works, designated by the Wehrmacht as an important military concern. Before its liquidation in June 1943 a typhus epidemic struck the camp, killing almost one-tenth of all its prisoners, the remainder of whom were transported to the Majówka Judenlager. The sick were usually shot, their corpses thrown into a mass grave dug by healthy Jews in the fields of Płus.
It was winter when my father was brought to Strzelnica. The cold was unrelenting, and at night he thawed out in a prohibited bunker. As the warmth swept over his fatigued body he succumbed to a deep sleep, from which he was roused by bright torches and Ukrainian guards who forced him to rest his head on a chair as they whipped his backside fifty times.
‘The first ten were the worst,’ he explains. ‘After that your toches went to sleep.’
Stories which I had heard many times, first as a child, later as an adult, but on these occasions he drew invisible objects in the air, melting into an indistinguishable blur. Here, at the site of his enslavement, his hands point toward concrete spaces—furtive corners, grassy patches, steel boxes—weaving each object into a prisoner narrative.
He bares his arms, rolling up the corner of his trousers to expose bubbled flesh wounded in a moment of reckless adventure. He relates how he managed to find raw potatoes, a pot, and a cauldron of hot oil. It was a dangerous mission, but starvation suspended any hesitations as he placed his pot on the edge of the cauldron’s heat while scanning for signs of a suspicious Ukrainian guard. ‘No one caught me,’ he says with boyish pride, ‘not even when I tripped and knocked the oil over me.’ It splattered parts of his body, and by the morning his skin had swelled to reveal a surface of pockmarked holes whose burning pain prevented him from working for days.
‘It’s hard to see them now,’ he says as he rolls down his trousers, ‘but I can still see the holes.’
The air is thick from the chilly frost of early spring, but my father can see everything today. Through the fog and mist he hugs scarred memories to his chest, whispering bitter secrets unearthed from their hibernation.
Once reawakened, they never rest again.
I pray for forgetfulness.
Why, why had we brought him here?
XXVI
Proceedings and examination records
on the atrocities of the Nazis
in the Bołszowce District,
of the Stanisławów Region,
9 March 1945.
The Nazi invasion authorities and their accomplices occupied Bołszowce on 3 July 1941.
On the first days of occupation, they began exterminating the peaceful population, namely, Ukrainians, Russians, and especially, Jews. They imposed a fine on the population, robbed and confiscated property, beating defaulters in public by whips and sticks, and forcing people to flee to Germany.
‘Mum, I don’t understand. Which shootings did your parents witness?’
‘My father saw it, from a distance. I wasn’t there at the time.’
‘Do you remember anything about burial in a mass grave?’
‘I told you what I know: the shootings, how I hid, Müller, and then Rohatyn.’
‘Grandpa must have testified before the Soviet Commission, after liberation, when you all returned to Bołszowce. But the dates, everything, it’s all so confusing.’
‘My father would not have confused anything. He had a brilliant mind, and a memory to match. The Russians must have got it all wrong. It was such a long time ago.’
On the first day of occupation, the Germans gathered 450 Jews and 32 Ukrainians in the town of Bołszowce, and made them kneel.
The Germans beat the Jews with whips and sticks, and threw stones at them. The Jews were forced to strip and clean the town lavatories.
‘But this document was written in 1945. People would have remembered everything that happened.’
‘I was so young, I’m telling you. There was more than one Aktion.’
‘You don’t remember anything else: about dates, time, the year?’
‘We were going to synagogue. It was early morning, still dark, and it was a Jewish holiday. Rosh Hashana or Yom Kippur.’
Jews were forbidden to walk in the central streets of the town.
Jews were forced to sew special marks on their sleeves in order to define their ethnic origin.
‘It was Yom Kippur. You’re right. The Aktion took place on 21 September 1942.’
‘I’m right, he says. What an honour. What do you know about Aktions? We were standing like little lambs. Screams, crying. A massacre of weeping lambs.’
‘The Judenrat was still spared that day, so your father would have been at the offices where you later hid. Are you sure he was in the cupboard with you?’
‘Don’t interrogate me. I’m your mother, not your prisoner.’
On 14 March 1942 there was a huge roll-call for Jews and other Soviet people.
Jews were loaded in cattle cars, 80 people in each car, and deported to their death in Bełz, where they were shot at one of the cemeteries.
‘Your mother and brother joined a transport from Bukaczowce that day, and picked up some friends in Rohatyn. Then it was off to Bełżec.’
‘How can you be so sure? Were you there? You think because you’ve read a few pieces of paper that you suddenly understand everything?’
‘Listen to what this piece of paper says: Müller confesses that the deportations were never worth his time unless they could collect at least 600 people in a single Aktion. But even here the document is totally confused. It says Bełz, not Bełżec.’
‘A different place altogether, night from day. “Bełz, mein shtetele Bełz …” It’s one of my favourite songs. But I wonder why they chose Bełz for the song? Why not a different shtetl, maybe Bołszowce? No, not Bołszowce. Not Bełżec either.’
‘Mein shtetele Bełżec …’
‘Have you gone crazy? How can you sing that? They built the crematoria there.’
Among 1380 people, one family survived by chance. They were Leo Krochmal and his wife Rosa who witnessed the shootings.
‘The shootings Grandpa and your mother saw must have been in March before they began sending Jews to their death … Snow, do you remember snow? I read somewhere it was minus forty-two degrees centigrade.’
‘Snow? What are you doing to me? I’ll tell you what happened but you won’t find the words to write it. It was at the end. We were all separated. My mother on a train, me in the Rohatyn ghetto, my father looking for a place to hide us. After the Yom Kippur Aktion. He came back, and he saw the Judenrat digging their own graves. The last Jews. Shot. Just like that. Shot. He was meant to be in the pit too. The end of Bołszowce. But not him. Not him. You don’t know what it is to be spared.’
‘I’m still not sure that your father wasn’t referring to an earlier raid on your town.’
‘For godsake, who do you think you are? The People’s Investigator? What does it matter now? Do you think even Müller cared about dates? Maybe you should ring Herr Müller and ask him: “Entschuldigung, excuse me, but do you know when my mother was born, or when my uncle was killed?” ’
‘Why did you have t
o choose such an obscure shtetl? Who ever heard of Bołszowce? It’s so confusing. Even the SS weren’t certain who was in charge. Couldn’t you have chosen a prestigious town with survivors and books, like Łódź or Vilna? Or somewhere in Germany?’
Total shot and tortured to death … 1381
Ukrainians shot … 155
Deported for forced labour to Germany … 858
‘My father could speak a beautiful German. He taught me a poem after the war: Bei dem Glanze der Abendröte, ging ich still den Wald entlang, Das es von … I can’t remember the end. Das es von … no, no, I must be getting old. Grey hairs from all your questions.’
‘You quote Schiller, birds chirping in trees, and they shoot Jews into pits?’
‘Goethe. Johann Wolfgang.’
‘Who cares? Do you know any German poems about how they gathered you in the valley and sent your family off to Bełżec?’
‘No, Mattis and my mother first jumped off the train near Lwów. I know that because my mother survived. Three times she jumped from the trains.’
‘She must have sensed where the trains where heading, otherwise why would she risk jumping with her son? I read somewhere about a man who escaped near Lwów from the same transport; he returned on foot and told a friend how so many Jews had already died on the trains.’
‘You read, you read. Books, books, everywhere. But do you know how it feels? In a train, all crowded, to not know where your mother is. You always know where I am. You pick up the phone and ring. But in a train. And to jump. With your only son. Then caught and taken to prison. It was in a place called Sand Hills, in Lwów, and they shot Jews in the valley. You won’t find Mattis in a book. Think of him in the valley, not yet barmitzvah, handsome, so kind. And shot. My brother. Gone.’
The Fiftieth Gate Page 11