The Fiftieth Gate

by Mark Raphael Baker

  It is still raining at Yad Vashem when I prepare to dial the next number. Whose number? The daughter, the son, or the father? Remember, he is over ninety years old, what will I say? ‘Hello, it’s Mark Baker from Australia. You don’t know me, but I’m a Bekiermaszyn.’

  When did he hear, or think about that name last? As I say it, will the picture crystallise in his mind of a forty year old man who stood by his side as they carted loads of potatoes? Will he remember when Leib was stricken with disease, how he urged him to fight the illness by weaving stories about Wierzbnik; of Sabbath strolls along the frozen lake with Hinda and Malka, their children laughing? He will never admit the sense of failure that must have haunted him after he failed to rescue Leib from the jail in Starachowice, and again in Buchenwald, but he will tell me with pride how he helped Leib’s son—my father—first in Auschwitz, then again on his return to Buchenwald. ‘You will survive with these potatoes,’ he must have told my father. ‘They could not rescue your father Leib, but I promise they will save you. Kartofel. Food for a king.’

  I hesitate before dialling the next six digits. The pause lasts for less than a second; I’m too curious. The phone rings, as I rehearse my lines. Baker? Bekiermaszyn? The phone is still ringing, its shrill sound pounding to the beat of my heart. It rings but there is no answer. Maybe Benjamin and his wife are visiting their children, doting over the grandchildren. I dial the next number on my list and this time somebody answers.

  ‘Hello, can I please speak with Chaya?’

  It is a youthful voice; presumably her daughter, a Kogut grandchild. She calls her mother to the phone.

  Hello, I stumble in Hebrew, and I begin to explain who I am. Baker, Bekiermaszyn. Your father helped my grandfather, perhaps saved my father. Where is he? Can I please speak to him?

  She is crying. ‘You are nine years too late,’ she says in hushed tones. ‘But tell me everything. He never spoke about the war. It was too painful. At his funeral people told me he helped them in Buchenwald. And in Auschwitz. But he never spoke. All I have is one single photograph from after his liberation; but no memories. Please, tell me.’

  ‘In the camps he was a shneider,’ is the first detail about his life that springs to mind, ‘a tailor.’

  ‘Here too,’ she says. ‘He came to Israel with nothing and built a new life. You know that his wife and two children were killed during the Shoah. Here he met Marta, and from his second marriage he had two children.’

  My thoughts had never paused to consider the fate of his wife. I had not even noticed the discrepancy between the names recorded on Kogut’s war documents—Malka—and the information about his wife Marta given to me over the phone by the Search Bureau. What happens to the families that die? Do survivors like Kogut seek out wives who resemble the ones that perished, and then plan to have the same number of children they left behind? Only two letters stand between Malka and Marta—two letters and a lifetime.

  We exchange details and promise to contact each other when my parents arrive in Israel for Passover.

  Again, I find myself peering into memory’s black hole.

  And then the sudden realisation: Malka watched Hinda die, just as Benjamin had witnessed the death of his friend Leib.

  XLII

  here in this carload

  i am Hinda

  tell him that i …

  The ghetto policeman slams the door, pushing the darkness of night into our vehicle. There are three windows on either side of the carriage, but the light outside is insufficient to illuminate the box. Not a box, I think, but a coffin. My prayers and hands reach out for my children.

  ‘Yenta! Martale!’

  My pleas are answered by a woman whose body leans against mine, begging for a cup of water. ‘My child,’ she pleads. I pass her the single flask preserved for my family. She pours water into the mouth of her infant, at rest in her arms. Shadowy figures grope in the dark, forming a sea of human pillars held upright in a wooden cage.

  ‘We must change carriages,’ I protest, ‘no air in here, can’t breathe.’

  When I last used the train from the Kolejowa railway station, a Polish officer sitting behind a square window had obliged me with a numbered ticket. His face, cut in half by a bushy moustache, nodded in the direction of a glimmering train.

  ‘Radom,’ he said.

  ‘Please, let me come,’ my daughters had begged, but I sent them to school, reassuring them with promises of future trips with their father who frequently travelled to Częstochowa to collect glassware. That was in 1939, eleven months before the truck collected Leib from his cell in Starachowice.

  ‘Jews, we’re finished,’ someone matter-of-factly comments. Everyone is wailing as the train signals its departure with a shrill whistle, as if it were a prompt for the passengers to begin reciting the mourner’s Kaddish:

  ‘Yisgadal ve yiskadash shmei rabba.’

  ‘Quiet,’ a woman shouts, ‘they won’t kill young people.’

  Her futile protest increases the volume of those sanctifying God’s name, inciting her to scream wildly, cursing.

  ‘Cowards! Bless life, not death. They’re taking us to work.’

  A child’s voice rises defiantly above the rest: ‘Blessed be the Lord who has kept us alive, sustained us, and brought us to this day.’

  ‘Yenta, not here, not in this box.’

  ‘Mameh,’ she answers, but her voice is drowned out by a chorus of wails.

  A man lies prostrate as if in prayer. He is pushing his head against the floor boards.

  ‘Breathe through the floor,’ I call out to my children.

  People struggle to curl their body to the floor, pushing at the person pressed against them so that human bodies are flying over the shoulders of the strong ones, like chicken wings strewn on a plate. A young boy is shouting for his mother as his head rubs against the ceiling of the train, until it falls back limply. My own foot knocks against a head. I strain to lift it but it is trapped beneath the weight of sleeping passengers. A man is folded on the floor like a pair of ironed trousers. The screams are indistinguishable; every voice sounds like the cry of my daughters, but there is no way of knowing.

  I bury my face into a woollen jacket which brushes against my eyes. I crouch in this position for an unmeasured distance, counting time by the steady motion of the train wheels speeding across tracks on unknown terrain. ‘Martale, Yentale,’ I whisper. There is silence on the train save for the sound of a tortured wheeze. The air is mixed with the pungent odour of fresh vomit and faeces. It is an effort to breathe, but I strain my neck to the edge of the woollen torso and inhale. We stand like a forest of trees. My fingers form a web against the wooden beams of the ceiling. My head spins with the terror of losing my daughters.

  They are lost somewhere in this monster with infinite heads and limbs, perhaps swallowed in its jaws. I rest this way through the night. Sweat drips from my cheeks into the void below. Behind my eyes are dancing images in shades of grey and black. I imagine they are the shadows of Yenta and Marta. Their tiny heads and plaited hair rest easily, lulled into dreams by Yiddish melodies which tell of daddy’s return and handsome grooms. Ay li lu, my lips quaver, lu li lu. The songs reach the ears of Baruch and Yossl as they march up the hill where work-papers will surely secure their survival. For my Leibush, it is too late.

  Prayers float across the carriage.

  ‘Sha.’

  ‘Mameh, vi bistu, where are you?’

  It is Marta. Please, I beg, let her through, but there is no possibility of movement through the parched forest grown in this box. The silence has surrendered to a rising wail, joined by my own voice. The scramble for air starts again; elbows push against wrinkled faces, squeezing bodies onto the floor. A mother screams that her baby is dead, singing to its broken innocence until she throws it beneath her feet. Silver spoons, faded photographs and feathers fly overhead, the emptied contents of a case abandoned by its owner. A young child has pulled his clothes off; mortified, he claws his neck wit
h bloodied fingernails. I recognise his green shirt from a familiar image of hanging cloth flapping from our neighbour’s window alongside the fringes of a ritual shawl. Yenta was wearing a blouse and yellow skirt: I scour the ground for flashes of colour.

  ‘Water, water,’ a man desperately shouts through a half-open window. He is suspended on the hind of a sleeping child when the train accelerates, before slowing down to accomplish a sharp bend. I recognise the man from the bakery in Piłsudski Street, his head rummaging inside an oven from where he produces poppyseed cakes balanced on a rack. Now his head is poking through a window and with a single thrust forward I watch his body slide into an open gap. A shoe drops onto a child. Within seconds the train pulls to a halt, and from outside can be heard the commotion of slamming doors and soldiers screaming orders to each other in German, followed by gunshots whose blasting sounds reverberate in the sky.

  The train restores its winding motion through mountainous terrain. Passengers huddle with their hands stretched upward. A moving shadow tugs at my skirt. ‘Yenta,’ I instinctively mutter, but my hands cannot identify the silent form tied to my legs. We hang together like this for a prolonged period, measuring time by raspy breaths and the churning of wheels. Through a part of the window I see the tip of pine trees framed like a moving picture. A new rumour ripples through the train:

  ‘Have you heard of Obermajdan? They say that is where we are headed.’

  The train comes to a standstill. Railway workers approach the carriage. People near the window hang their hands out begging for water. The thirst is harder to bear than the hunger; a desperate woman feeds her baby its own urine, while another offers a child the salty juice of her skin to lick. A man stands on the platform, his face and skeletal eyes looking upward toward an invisible spot. He raises a hand toward his neck, and flicks a finger across his throat.

  The doors are drawn open by gloved hands brandishing whips. I close my eyes against the rush of light. We fall onto the platform in a continuous wave. I step over the body of an old man who has collapsed at the foot of the train, as if it were prey for vultures to eat. Piles of clothes form soft mountains on the ground, alongside hills of shaving brushes and a lake shimmering with assorted shapes of eye-glasses. ‘Why do these people not take care of their belongings?’ I wonder. A new pile forms, composed of fatigued bodies dragged from one of twenty carriages running the length of the railway siding. The bodies have horribly bloated bellies and the surface of their skin is already marked with sores. My eyes involuntarily gaze at fallen bits and pieces, legs, arms, torsos and heads which I recognise from flashing fragments of my life: from tables adorned with Sabbath linen and flames lit by mothers blessing flickering lights; from children licking fingers in Mama’s shop and fathers sewing suits with skilful hands; from swaying shapes draped in white offering prayers in synagogues consumed by flames on sacred days. ‘Yenta,’ I scream, and I hear the echo of a cry calling Mameh bursting from the depths of the heap.

  ‘Mameh,’ Marta shouts.

  A guard grips her arm and drives her into the loose crowd. I race toward her and embrace my daughter before a whip separates us.

  ‘Water,’ she whimpers. There is none to offer.

  In the distance I hear the sound of an orchestra playing a military tune.

  ‘Martale, look. A train station. Look, ticket-windows, and over there. A baggage counter.’

  My clothes smell of decay and ruin, yet the music revives my body. It makes me feel human again. The orchestra members appear, marked by yellow stars, under a clock face whose hands read 10.25. A new sense of order reigns above the chaos of milling people, comforting me in the face of this unknown transit point. A man dressed in a railway uniform asks for our tickets, and conducts us to a small square, as if we are travellers on a spring holiday.

  ‘Gold, cash, foreign currency and jewellery must be turned in at the ticket office,’ a voice blasts above the din. ‘You will be given receipts for these valuables. Your valuables will be returned to you later on presentation of your receipts.’

  Signs, in Polish and German, point in all directions.

  ‘Station Obermajdan! Umsteigen nach Bialystok und Wolkowysk.’

  ‘Obermajdan Station! Change here for Białystok and Wolkowysk.’

  The music beckons us toward the continuation of our journey. A mother scolds her child for soiling his pants; a young girl combs her hair as if preparing for a date; a father begs his friend for money to purchase a ticket to join his cousins in Białystok. My eyes follow the railway lines, wondering where their tracks will lead us. Who knows how long it has been since we linked ourselves with these lines near my house? A young girl behind us tightens her scarf, an old woman sits on her suitcase. They are all waiting, but the railway lines lead nowhere. Was the music also a figment of my imagination? And what is this huge wall covered with yellowing branches leading off from the square?

  ‘The tickets,’ I shout at Marta. ‘Come, let’s ask that man in the railway uniform where we can purchase tickets for Warsaw.’

  My eyes search for the uniformed man but settle on barbed wire fences. Another train pulls up on the other side. Those alive pour out as if a flood of water has been unleashed from its ramparts. The languages mix in the air: Polish, German, Yiddish, all lost in shrill sounds whose elements I cannot decipher. Bent figures stream out with suitcases and bags, dressed in warm fur coats. I feel jealousy toward them, for they have retained the possessions we relinquished at the start of the war.

  ‘Water,’ they beg. ‘Vasser, vasser.’

  A man draws a cup from his coat pocket. Before he has time to bring it to his lips a boy sinks his teeth into his arms and catches the falling container.

  An officer dressed in black begins to address us on the square where we have collected. He invites us to leave our baggage and to move forward toward the baths. We are instructed to take our identification papers, any valuable objects and the few toiletries brought with us.

  ‘Should we take our towels?’ Marta asks me. I shake my head; all our belongings have been left on the train.

  ‘Where is Yentale?’ she inquires.

  I shake my head again as we walk through the enclosure set against a wall of barbed wire. It is overgrown with branches and thick green leaves. The music plays for us as we follow the trail past a muddied ditch. Ahead I can make out the shape of watch-towers. I glance behind and notice the workers with sky-blue arm-bands unpacking our baskets and cases. Perhaps they will find my small brown case and retrieve its contents: a spare dress, an outfit for each of the girls, a pouch containing money gathered at the last moment, and a picture of Leib staring into the camera with his arms wrapped around his four children.

  We arrive at another square where a large shed stands before us. I manage to cast a glance inside before I am pushed on by a whip which drives the crowd to quicken its pace. The image lingers: a mountain of clothes, and in another window, shoes, enough to clothe the whole of Starachowice.

  A whip cracks to signal the command: ‘Achtung! Men will stay where they are. Women and children will undress in the shed to the left.’

  The command is repeated: ‘Men to the right! Women and children to the left!’

  Near us a young girl, about Yenta’s age, says goodbye to her father, and, stroking his eyes, comforts him: ‘Have no fear, Daddy. Daddy don’t worry,’ and then she hands over her watch, saying: ‘Take it. You’ll remain alive and you’ll have it. Take it.’

  ‘Women and children will remove shoes before entering. Children’s socks must be placed in their shoes, sandals or boots.’

  We enter a wooden barrack where I follow the movements of other women. First I remove my shoes and tie them together with special laces passed around by inmates. I help Marta remove her tiny black shoes. She ties the shoes together on her own. I fold my black coat on a bench, and place the remainder of my clothes in a neat pile: a white blouse, grey skirt, and thin stockings. I hesitate to remove my underwear, shamed by my own nakedness
before women whose homes I have visited clad in Sabbath finery and a silk kerchief. Marta stares at my bareness, while I admire her body which is flowering in its graceful prime. We move silently through the door toward the next shed like brides headed for ritual purification.

  This room is lined by female inmates who shear our hair. I wait my turn, and diffidently watch my dark mane fall, as if it were cut from a captive animal. Women cooperatively hand over their wigs, the last vestige of their modesty.

  ‘A little shorter here please,’ Marta tells the hairdresser. ‘Please, make it even.’

  Her thick black hair drops in a single lock like a twisted potato peel. ‘What’s going to happen to us?’ she asks the barber, who flinches before gliding the clippers across her bowed head.

  ‘Schneller. Schneller. Schneller.’

  I feel shame in front of the male officers who flick their whips in our direction, forcing us to run until we are arranged like a military detachment of pink flesh.

  ‘Faster, faster.’

  I hold Marta by her fragile arms. Her pace is flagging.

  ‘Hands above heads.’

  ‘Marta,’ I scream, ‘Stay with Mameh.’ We thrust our hands into the air as commanded, and quicken our frenzied pace. A terrible odour wafts past my nose, different from the smell of decay which dominated our carriage.

  ‘Schneller. Schneller.’

  Marta is dancing, reaching with her fingertips for the dark clouds. Her shaved crown glistens under the sky which closes above us as we run into a narrow passage bordered with flowers and a pine grove. Three musicians play a flute, violin and mandolin under a tree at the entrance to the tube. They perform a harmonious dirge. I recognise it as the nightly lullaby my mother sang as she stroked my hair until my eyes would close in sleep. ‘Ay li lu,’ I hum to Marta. Her hands are performing lyrical movements in the air.