This Aktion took place on 8 December 1942—‘soon after’ my mother’s arrival. Up to 2000 Jews were transported to Bełżec, while on the same day about 500 people were executed and buried close to the hospital.
‘We’re not going to Rohatyn, or to Bursztyn, or anywhere,’ my father protests. ‘Did we go to Szydłowiec where my father was born? It was enough we saw Wierzbnik. Nothing there and nothing here.’
My mother is humming a Yiddish lullaby as we drive past a signpost: Rohatyn. Hush. Was this tune silenced by the marching boots?
My father thought we had all died in the ghetto. He was hiding in a village near Bołszowce and had been told that we had all been killed. But my mother came back. Somehow, though it was illegal, she came one day to Rohatyn with a bandaged head. She was hurt when she jumped from a train. She’d bought a special work permit which allowed you to go into the forbidden streets outside the ghetto. But how was she to get me out? So she organised that one day they dressed me up, like a country girl with a scarf wrapped around my head, and she hired a horse and wagon—it had potatoes on it—and this way she took me out of the ghetto. But they caught us. They took us to their headquarters and, my word of honour, I remember exactly how I begged that man because I knew that the punishment for what we had done was death. He was Polish, I cried to him, saying:
‘You probably have children of your own, and I’m only a child and please don’t shoot me, don’t let them shoot me, and if you shoot me, let me run and shoot me in the back so that I don’t see it. Please, please.’
It was a miracle; he let me go, but we had to return to the ghetto. My mother knew that it was only a matter of time till the next Aktion; she knew we wouldn’t survive if we didn’t escape, and she told me that all she cared about was saving my life. ‘I have already lost my son,’ she told me, ‘I don’t care about myself but I want you to survive.’ So she tried again to smuggle me through, and this time we succeeded. I was dressed as a young Polish girl, riding on a wagon, and no one stopped us. That’s the last time I saw Rohatyn and I heard from my mother, who had to go back, that soon after there was another Aktion.
My mother still possesses an instinct for the intricate strategies of survival. I have seen her talk her way out of all situations—in hotels without a vacancy, in shops when she regrets a purchase, in family arguments when she knows she is wrong. It is always the child’s voice on the edge of tears, flowing into the fragile woman beset with nerves, pleading but proud. As a last resort, she will secure victory in her angriest voice, perform a half-pivot, skirt flying, and exit a lady.
‘I don’t understand why Raisl couldn’t remain with you?’ I once asked my mother.
‘It was too risky,’ was all she said, but I learned why later.
The town of Rohatyn is by now behind us as we make our way toward the Ukrainian–Polish border crossing at Medyka. A car flashes its high-beam lights in our direction.
‘A disaster!’ my father mutters. ‘A disaster! How could you bring me back here? For what? So I can have more nightmares?’
‘Yossl, you’ve never been here before,’ my mother silences him. ‘You don’t have to have nightmares about the Aktions here. You’ve got enough to dream about from your own town.’
‘Avek. Away. Home.’
The car overtakes us and speeds ahead.
‘Now you can relax,’ my mother says in Yiddish, ‘the Banderowce have gone.’
Our Ukrainian ‘tour guide’ glares angrily at our family, squashed in the back two rows of the car.
My mother giggles and defiantly pronounces the word from her seat by the window: ‘Banderowce.’
‘Shaa. Shaa. Home. Avek.’
I had heard this strange word ‘Banderowce’ before in my mother’s story. They belong to the parts toward the end of the war when the villages in which she sought shelter were set on fire by bands of Ukrainian militiamen.
After the war I returned to Bołszowce with my parents, but I was the only child survivor. I think I was really an exception, a miracle. I don’t know how long we stayed there, because the Banderowce attacked us again—not only us, but they were killing Poles as well. We used to sleep in the church, the one where they gathered us on the hill during the war. I remember in the middle there was a table and two beds, and I slept on the table. We suddenly heard shooting from the Banderowce and hid in the attic while they searched downstairs. We had to leave Bołszowce. Nothing was there for us any more—no Jews, our house was gone, the Russians had taken over. Nothing, just me, my mother and father, and maybe a handful of others who hid with us in the forests.
The Banderowce earned its notorious reputation from the name of Stefan Bandera, commander of the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists. Before the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, Bandera helped the Nazis establish a Ukrainian police battalion which accompanied the German forces in their drive through Galicia. What was preferable, I often wondered during my parents’ reminiscences, unrestrained savagery or death mapped out by bureaucrats, meticulous and disciplined?
At last we arrive at the border.
Still no relief for my father. The crossing is choked with cars negotiating their way past the Ukrainian police. It is already after midnight and at least two hours appear to separate us from the Polish side of the border. To make matters worse, every time the gates open a swarm of vehicles from behind push their way in front.
We complain to the guide: ‘At this rate we’ll be stuck here forever.’
‘Come on,’ my brother Johnny says, ‘let’s go out and see if this green-back will help us.’
‘No. No. No. Don’chu dare. Don’chu dare. No. No. No. I won’t let you. Close the window. Shut the door. You don’t know. No. No. No.’
Three hours later we are across the border, driving through the night toward Warsaw.
My mother is asleep. She had rolled up her coat for use as a pillow, but it has fallen away. Her head bounces against the window without any cushioning. A tired smile highlights the lines at the edges of her mouth.
My father is still awake. His eyelids are closing, but he resists the motion of his head falling forward. He shakes his head in a circle while holding his eyes open with his fingers. His head nods again, and then lifts in a stubborn act of will. Or is it fear?
Tonight, I know, he will not sleep. Not yet. Not until he feels safe enough to once again close his eyes.
XXXII
‘I don’t believe you.’
It was the first time during my mother’s story that I had expressed doubt about her memory recall. No, it wasn’t a question of accuracy this time, but of her intentions.
‘My word of honour,’ she was saying. ‘It was total darkness. That’s why to this day I am afraid of night, of blackness, of closed spaces.’
It was an uncontrollable urge, this repeated questioning of her, this interrogation, as if I was David Irving and not her son pointing the video camera at her.
And then, to my everlasting shame, I crossed the boundary:
‘Prove it,’ I heard myself saying. ‘I don’t believe this part. Prove it.’
So she did.
Without pausing for breath, she recited the Lord’s Prayer for me in Polish. It slid off her tongue with perfect fluency, exactly as she must have recited it fifty years ago as a young child.
Ojcze nasz, któryś jest w niebie,
Swieć się Imię Twoje
Przydź Królestwo Twoje
Bądz Wola Twoja
… Amen
My mother, Jesus’ little helper.
Amen.
My mother, the same one who every Friday evening, moments before the setting of the sun, welcomes the Sabbath by lighting two candles, pressing her hands against her eyes while she silently blesses her God who ‘has commanded us to light the Sabbath candles’, after which she covers every square inch of her meticulously set table with platters of chicken soup, gefilte fish, roast chicken and fruit compote. She recovers from the day’s cooking on her favourit
e chair from which she looks up every five minutes to ask: ‘Nu? Can your mother cook? Can she cook?’
My mother who loves to recite Hebrew poetry, who will turn to her two boys before declaiming Hayim Nahman Bialik’s ‘El Hatsippor’ (‘To a Bird’) and remind them: ‘And this without a university degree, without a childhood,’
Chirping, singing, dearest birdling,
Tell the wonders of that distant
Land from which you came
In that fairer, warmer climate
Are the troubles and the trials
Multiplied the same?
My mother who … this is not my mother. This is not the one who
on a hill, it was. The village was not far from Rohatyn and we hid in a small farm on a hill.
They were two families and I remember the house, isolated on a hill, and there I was in a bunker again. All my life those years I was in bunkers. In a cellar all day, underground and closed, and nothing, in the darkness, all the time. It was a small, small space, a little square like this table here. At night they used to take us out. First it was only my father and me. They would feed us and we had a wash, and then back to the bunker.
Yes, only at night.
They would have been killed if someone knew.
How? In a potty, one for each of us.
No, no, no way. You couldn’t stand up. You could sit up but not stand up.
Pitch black. Pitch black, that’s how I was for years. And when … on my word of honour … when later on there was another Aktion in Rohatyn, my mother managed to escape and come to us. Somehow, I don’t know what they discussed, but she stayed with us. So then they took us to the stania, that’s what it was called where the cows were, and they cut out a larger square piece and we were underground all day. All day underground.
Yes, even during the day it was dark, pitch black where we were hiding. Yes, what do you think, that I’m making this up? Who can you ask? There’s no one to ask. Look at me now, isn’t that enough? It was dark, I’m telling you.
With my father? We talked, no we whispered, couldn’t talk, but he was very nice to me before my mother came. Pitch black, for years I had pitch black.
Some bread.
Read? What are you saying? How could you? One hundred per cent black. I’m telling you, we washed, we walked a bit, and we went back to the bunker. Then my mother came and we had the other bunker. Was a little bit bigger. No, no way! We still couldn’t walk. The whole day! And at night too! I remember my mother talking to me and I used to say, ‘Oh mummy, when will I ever have a bed? Will I ever have a bed of my own the way I used to have and my toys and my everything?’ At least two years, it must have been. You don’t? Well I’m telling you, like that square table, for two years; yes, between my chair and yours, not bigger, only dark, dark.
Sometimes we were allowed out to the farm house, but only at night. I remember a butcher lived there, one Polish lady who was widowed, and she had a child about my age, and this little girl knew that we are Jews and we are hiding, and she understood that she is not allowed to talk about it. I don’t know that I would have been able to do for them what they did for us.
Why? I can’t tell you. No, not money. It was something else, doesn’t matter. I could see; at night when he came out, the way she looked at him, the way he looked at her. He had to … otherwise she wouldn’t take my mother in. I don’t think they argued.
They made such pastries for me—pierogi. Sometimes special things. They always gave me the same to eat as their child.
Oh yes, I remember the house: one room on each side.
A farm. They got up early in the morning, they had potatoes, chooks and eggs. And cows, we used to hear the cows and other animals above us. For two years: ‘Mooo, Mooo. Maaa. Maaa.’
What do you mean, do I remember? Stop interrogating me. Stop testing me. What, all these years you thought because I wasn’t in Auschwitz like your father that I didn’t suffer? Because I don’t have a number means I didn’t survive?
That is how I came to hear my mother recite the Lord’s Prayer in Polish.
XXXIII
‘Who is Kogut?’ I ask my father.
His name reappears constantly in my father’s story, in Starachowice, in Auschwitz, in Monowitz, in Buchenwald; twice in Buchenwald, first with my grandfather, again with my father; even in the jail where Leib Bekiermaszyn was imprisoned. I fear for my father’s memory when he resorts to this name, as if all the people encountered in that five-year block he calls ‘The War’ have melted into one singular label inexplicably identified as Kogut. He pronounces the two syllables slowly, separating the ‘ko’ and the ‘gut’ into two distinct words. Kogut is omnipresent. He appears to me as a dybbuk, a phantom narrator who pursued my family’s story, manipulated their narrow escapes, mourned their deaths; a guardian angel in disguise.
When we came in the evening to Auschwitz this one man, I don’t remember his name, told me he had been with my father in Buchenwald. Kogut! That’s right, he was Kogut, he was the one who helped us bribe the Gestapo when my Daddy was arrested in Starachowice. The minute we arrived in Auschwitz he came to greet us, and asked if anyone was from Wierzbnik, our town. I didn’t recognise this man and told him that I was Bekiermaszyn. ‘Oh, Bekiermaszyn,’ he said, ‘yes, I know this name well,’ and he told me how before he was transferred to Auschwitz he had been with my father Leibush when he died in Buchenwald. It was a terrible shock. I knew we had buried the ashes, but it was still a shock, I never believed he was dead. I always hoped he was still alive; maybe the clothes and ashes belonged to someone else, maybe he would come home to us. But he was dead, and this Kogut told me how he’d been a good friend to my father and he helped me too. He was in charge of one of the barracks and he had connections: he told me he’ll find a good job for me here, not to worry, he’ll get me some food, and I remember how he brought me bread. He helped me survive in Auschwitz–Buna. I don’t know, if not for him, I don’t know.
I know that Kogut can help me too. This mysterious man is the only person whose life spans the memories of father and son, and can connect both to me.
He appears on the transport list to Buchenwald. In red pen: Benjamin Kogut. From Wierzbnik. Married to Malka. Two children. Prisoner 5488. Fifteen numbers separate him from my grandfather; they must have been in the same carriage, shaved within seconds of each other. Kogut is assigned to the same barrack as his friend Leib; to the same Kommando, first as a Potato-Peeler, then as a construction worker in the service of the SS. He has been condemned to Buchenwald for the identical crime: he has no political affiliations, except he has been charged as guilty for what the red pen emphatically marks on his registration documents: Jude!
He might have been my grandfather, except he does not appear on the officer’s notes for 6 December 1940. Prisoner 5488 is not listed alongside Prisoner 5503 in the day’s death toll, nor is his urn accounted for in the receipt book meticulously maintained by the Buchenwald crematory department. He is the only known witness to his friend’s death. ‘Leib,’ I know he whispered to him, ‘halt zich, hold on. Hinda is in der heim. Hold on for them.’
Imagine if it was the other way. Leib is holding Benjamin Kogut to his chest outside the Buchenwald infirmary, weeping: ‘Halt zich, hold on. Malka is in der heim. Hold on for them.’
For every alternative there is an alternative; every shadow casts its darkness on someone else’s light. That’s what all the survivors say: ‘It was luck. It could have been me. Maybe I lived on someone else’s number?’
Soon after Leib’s death, 5503 becomes a Catholic Pole, Jan Lebeder. In the camp system, only the numbers are eternal; they are reincarnated in new bodies. So why can’t my grandfather live on as his friend, Kogut? Why can’t it be him who survives along the route of Prisoner Number 5488, so that a different fate can carry Leib from Buchenwald to Auschwitz and back again to where he can be reunited with his two sons? Maybe even live to see his grandchildren in another country? For me to see him, my Zeyde.
It is 10 October 1942, almost two years since Leib Bekiermaszyn arrived in Buchenwald, when his Block Elder informs the inmates of Barrack 29 that they are to be transported to a new destination. The rumours spread in fragments—‘a work camp’; ‘somewhere in the east’, but none dares expose his gullibility by repeating the latest whispers of ‘selections’ and ‘gassing’.
Six days later the train transporting the Buchenwald veterans grinds to a halt near an iron gate marked with the words: Arbeit Macht Frei—‘Work Makes Free’. The arrivals are pushed through the entrance before a reception party of uniformed SS officers bearing whips. Belching smoke clouds the skies. ‘You are all condemned to die,’ they are told, ‘but the execution of your sentence will take a little while.’
A little while usually meant three months for the prisoners, who were privileged to have escaped immediate selection for the gassing facilities at the Auschwitz II camp known as Birkenau. With a new home comes a new number. A68528 is one of the earliest occupants of the wooden barracks of Auschwitz III—the Buna–Monowitz camp site containing a rubber and oil plant developed by I.G. Farben industries.
Leib Bekiermaszyn is enslaved in Monowitz for two years, assigned to a variety of work Kommandos in the service of German industry. He has watched at least 300,000 men pass through his compound, able-bodied men whose strength spared them the fate of those directed to the left. He is carrying steel girders on his shoulders when he hears of a new transport due to arrive that morning from the liquidated factories of the Radom District.
The Fiftieth Gate Page 14