‘Faster faster,’ the policemen in black uniform order. ‘The bath water is going to get cold. Hurry hurry.’
‘Ay li lu.’
Naked men have joined the crowd; a child runs into the arms of her father. Ahead of us, an SS officer beats an elderly woman with his club for delaying the line. He turns towards a young child, no more than four years old, and tears her from her mother’s arms. He raises the infant above his head like a sporting trophy and throws her onto the ground. She does not move. I am careful to step over her body when I pass, bending down to touch her warm hand.
The narrow path suddenly breaks open to reveal another square occupied by a concrete building. It resembles a temple from ancient times. Its entrance is decorated by wooden ornamental vases planted along a row of flower beds. A Star of David is etched into the gable on the front wall of the building. The doors are screened by a dark curtain bearing the Hebrew inscription: ‘This is the gate of God through which the righteous shall enter.’
‘Mameh,’ Martale whispers. ‘It’s a Shul. They want us to pray.’
I press her close to my body as we ascend five cement steps. Police dogs bark at the rising throng. From the side of the building I notice a bulldozer moving huge piles of yellow earth, leaving a cloud of dust in its wake. Teams of men are pushing tip-carts around the entrance. A tall man, with broad shoulders and black hair, cracks a thick whip at us. Another man, shorter and younger, bares his sword. We freeze in our steps, our arms still punching the air. One of the dogs is released and tears into the crowd, setting his teeth into the skin of a woman who shrieks in pain. Blood spurts on to my naked flesh. I emit a panicked cry, burying Marta into my bosom. Then another dog: ‘Go, Bari,’ I hear its commander shout, as if it was being sent to fetch a stick.
We are pushed through the gates of the temple leading into a dark narrow corridor. I hear the unmistakable sound of screams.
A door opens. I lift Marta, hugging her against my body.
‘Ay li lu.’
We are pushed by the crowd into a square room whose walls are already lined with early arrivals. Families huddle in corners; a man covers his eyes in prayer; a girl stands in a puddle of water, kicking her own excrement. My eyes fixate on the baked-tile floor, sloping downward toward a platform.
‘No more,’ a woman screams.
‘There’s no space.’
Nickel-plated shower heads protrude from the ceiling. At least five hundred people have been piled into the room.
‘No more.’
A child is thrown from the door above our heads.
‘Mameh,’ Marta whispers. ‘Where is Yenta?’
‘Sha, sha.’ I stroke her bare head, hoping the caress will send her to sleep, but the deafening screams rise.
‘Yisgadal ve yiskadash shmei rabba.’
Bodies are flying above us.
‘Shma yisrael. Hear O Lord.’
The doors are closed and our eyes look upward at the shower heads, praying for a stream of water.
We have bonded again into a single shape, a fleshy creature with writhing heads, arms and legs, dancing in contortions.
Two dark eyes. Eyes, peering through holes on the other side of the door. The eyes close, and open again. Do they see my eyes? A cloudy ethereal haze envelops the room, heightening our cherubic romp before God’s throne. The eyes dance too, in sockets staring through peep-holes.
‘Ay li lu.’
My heart pounds wildly. ‘Mameh,’ Marta hisses. ‘I can’t breathe. Where is the water?’
‘God will breathe for you, my darling.’
A heavy weight compresses my chest. My head spins, blurring floor, ceiling, heads and limbs into a compact mass. A mother holds up her child to avoid the crush; it is Malka, the tailor’s wife. She is wedged against her other child, his head drooping and arms stiffening like a broken doll.
Two eyes watch from glassy cavities behind the sealed door. What do they see?
Letters dancing, etched on broken tablets soaring up to angel arms tapping on the gate to God’s palace.
Aleph, beit. Holy letters blue and bloated, befouled with filth and excrement.
Gimmel, daleth. Rivers of blood gushing through gates from the crowns of wounded scrolls. Letters with eyes, holes wide open, tangled in words carved on arms strapped in leather.
Heh, vav spewed from twisted tongues and mouths. Seraphs dancing for God, banging at His gate.
Zayin, het. Bulging eyes peering through keyholes broader than Wierzbnik. Stone letters turning locks; limp bodies lying in a room larger than the world.
Tet, yod. The point of light, pouring through the fiftieth gate.
tell him
tell Him that i
XLIII
A child is born
with infinite memory.
It remembers,
the secrets of creation
the fruits in the garden
the place of the hidden key
the wounded martyrs
the breathless bones
Job’s lament
his own cry.
Until an angel flies into the infant’s mouth,
touches its unformed lips, so that nothing,
not a word, a sound or fragrance, is remembered.
Sometimes the angels forget,
or perhaps they are frightened to fly into the
silent cry
of those reborn.
XLIV
My father is pointing at the name of his town etched on a stone wall. He is standing in the ‘Valley of Destroyed Communities’ at Yad Vashem, and has found the area marked Radom District. The Jerusalem pine trees are conspicuously absent from this part of the valley; in place of vegetation, tombstones sprout from the earth, flowering in the shape of a map of Europe whose stony petals number the memories of murdered towns and cities. It is a consoling memory site which can be visited by survivors who lose themselves in the craggy maze until they arrive at a familiar inscription on a gravestone carved out of cracked limestone.
My father is lost in Wierzbnik, surrounded by friends from neighbouring towns whose fingers point upwards at the places they knew in their youth and remember today: Iłża, Szydłowiec, Ostrowiec, Wolanów. Those gathered here today share three months of time lived out before the watchtowers of Buchenwald between January and April 1945. They argue about distances, reminisce about horse-buggies laden with cargo destined for a town on the top edge of the stone, while they smile for the camera which freezes a forest of arms waving in triumph before the upright grave.
My mother is balanced on her toes, pointing with a red umbrella to Bołszowce. She is in the Stanisławów District, somewhere in the Ukraine, in a region facing Tarnopol. Her lone hand waves at Rohatyn, but Bursztyn is too high on the rock to touch.
One stone for so many lives and so many more untold deaths; a single signpost for the streets and synagogues and schools that were destroyed. Where on the rock labelled Wierzbnik is my father’s house and the doorway leading to his bedroom? Is my mother’s childhood buried in the cracks surrounding the letters of her town? She rests her head on the rock, as if she means to swallow its words, to relive the path she once travelled on the spaces between each chiselled letter: Bursztyn–Bołszowce–Rohatyn. Somewhere on the stone lies the forest where she hibernated after the fires pursued her from her place of shelter. She caresses the solid surface, resting her hands on a patch of tangled weeds as she whispers her secrets into it, breathing words and letters whose shapes will be entombed inside the rock’s petrified memory:
The fields were covered with corn. We dug a hole in the ground, and inside we lay, hidden by the wheat, with only a small hole left open for us to breathe. Rain, deep in water. For food, we would steal potatoes, and cook it on a fire; my mother pulled the hairs from the potato skin, and made dolls for me to play with as I sat amongst the wheat. In the day you could stand, but no taller than the corn, which protected us for as long as it was left unharvested.
That was in the sum
mer of 1944, the year Soviet soldiers marched into Galicia and liberated the remaining Jews huddling in bunkers in the forests where they hid from German manhunts. About ten thousand Jews were liberated in this way, escapees from ghettos sheltering in the West Ukrainian and Belorussian forests. Many of the Jews formed their own partisan units or joined other clandestine forces.
My mother neither resisted nor died; she survived somewhere beneath the surface of the ground, in blackness. When her liberators arrived, she kissed their feet.
Around the corner from my mother’s lone stone stands my father. He shares his rock with his friends, and extracts its dormant secrets. ‘Yossl Bekiermaszyn,’ they say, ‘has not grown older by a day.’ Half a century later, the Jerusalem sun reflecting off their corner of Poland illuminates the same eyes and smile which they recognise from their youth. ‘Yossele, Yossele,’ they laugh, and his eyes dance for them.
No one calls out ‘Genia, Genia,’ who is still whispering into the rock’s crevices.
‘Yossl, Yossl,’ cries a man from a stone in the Warsaw District who races to my father’s territory and falls into his open arms. Yossl does not recognise the man whose back he caresses, until he unlocks him from his embrace and observes a photograph pinned to the stranger’s lapel. He studies the two faces: first, the face bearing wrinkles and shrunken eyes, and then the black and white portrait of a smiling boy with dark hair protruding from a peaked cap. ‘Hershy,’ my father erupts, and the two friends grip each other in a fierce embrace.
My father can walk past each fragment of Poland and recognise someone from his youth. His memory is not contained by Wierzbnik, but expands to include his friends who shared his barracks in Auschwitz and Buchenwald. These final days of war have marked them out forever as the Buchenwald Boys, even though time after and time before was experienced separately. They are not known as the Auschwitz Boys or Treblinka Boys; in those sites identity is marked out by death or tattooed numbers. It takes life to forge a collective identity; the Boys must wait to be born during the moments that are counted after 3.15 p.m. on 11 April 1945.
3.16 p.m.
After the cheers came the food. Sixty thousand Jews walked out of the European concentration camps. Within a week twenty thousand had died, and many others were sick from malnutrition and physical abuse.
People were starving; the Americans saw how skinny we were and gave out cans of food. No one warned us not to eat. Food can kill, but people still ate as much as they could. Most ended up in hospital, so many died, everyone had diarrhoea.
This is my mother’s weekday menu:
Monday: liver with peas piled on mashed potatoes.
Tuesday: fish (‘only on Tuesday, when it’s fresh’).
Wednesday: spaghetti bolognese, my favourite.
Thursday: steak, chippies, tomato sauce.
Friday: Ahh, Friday—the Sabbath. Chicken soup, what else?
And Hershy Bars. My mother still savours these American chocolate bars, her rations in Berlin.
For my father, it is cabbage soup that connects his taste-buds to the camps. Anything tastes good in hunger, he tells us, a piece of bread, a drop of rain, watery soup. ‘Yossl!’ my mother shouts when he slurps the soup she has cooked for him. ‘Do you want a straw?’
The Americans told us we can spend one day in Weimar near Buchenwald. We went to farms in the area and stole bikes and chickens from the Germans. It’s not that we wanted to steal or kill anyone, but we were angry at the people who lived around the camp. I remember going into one house and wanting to take a piano accordion: ‘Please,’ the mother begged, ‘my boy has been playing it for ten years.’ So we left it for him to play.
When I was a child, I also learned to play the piano accordion. My father brought one home as a surprise, in a brown box with two latches. I opened it, and stretched the accordion out so that I could hear its natural sound. At first, I would rest it on the floor and ask my father to extend the bellows, in and out. I pressed my fingers against the keyboard. I sang the tunes I wanted to play, but could never find the corresponding notes. Eventually, a teacher was found, a Jew from Hungary. His thin moustache would wiggle as his hands slid along the keyboard, mouthing the words in his foreign accent: ‘Di Kempdown ricetrack fife miles long, dooh, daah, dooh daah.’ My interest in the accordion waned quickly.
We had to learn everything again from the beginning: how to eat, how to feel, how to be people.
‘Do you want to see how I bite my ears?’ This was Berel, one of my father’s friends, joking with us as children. Everyone in my parents’ circle of friends is a survivor. They entertain themselves by playing a round of cards, or on Saturday nights going to a film followed by a light supper. ‘Voz a good film,’ my father says, biting into a piece of apple strudel, ‘but I slept through most of it.’ Berel, we were told, survived the worst. He was shot into a pit, left lying on the dead bodies. Thought he was dead, then woke up, and escaped his grave. And now he wants us to bite our ears. We are jumping in the air, twisting our necks, reaching for our ears as we snap our jaws. ‘Can’t, can’t,’ we scream. But Berel can. He takes out his false teeth, and snap, he bites his ears. ‘Again, again,’ we shout in laughter. Snap.
My father’s journey back into life was encouraged by a US Military Chaplain, Rabbi Herschel Schacter, who had followed his army’s tanks into Buchenwald where ‘I saw the ravages of war; cities laid waste, homes destroyed, and human beings crushed’. By the autumn of 1945 my father was conveyed with 362 orphaned Jewish adolescents to Switzerland, where he was hospitalised in a sanatorium until he recovered from a mild bout of tuberculosis. Restored to health, he joined the Buchenwald Boys who were dispersed in youth centres in Riggisberg, Hilfikon, Engelberg, Rheinfelden, Morcote, or Trevano, each of which was distinguished by its political and religious orientation.
He was a rabbi and he took us into a Buchenwald barrack and said, ‘Look, I have arranged with the Red Cross that we can bring in four hundred kids to Switzerland, but here we are, maybe one or two thousand. I can’t take everybody, only kids.’
We all had to go into an office and there was a woman there who wrote out passports. She gave me and my brother one immediately, because she saw we were not too old, not too young. But there was one man, Farber was his name, a few years older, and he came crying to me:
‘They won’t give me a permit.’
So I said to him, ‘Look, I’ll try to do something to help you.’
It was the last day already, this I remember because we had a train to catch, so I ran up to Rabbi Schacter and pretended to be this man.
‘I’m Farber,’ I told him, ‘I want to go to Switzerland but they won’t give me a permit.’
He straight away took me to the office, and even though they had already given out 400 permits, he arranged one more for me, for Farber. When we passed through France, Rabbi Schacter—who was a friendly man—was talking to all the children, and came up to each one and said: ‘Hello, what’s your name?’ When he saw Farber he looked him up and down, and wanted to know his name. In the end, the Rabbi couldn’t let him come with us. He was too old, he said: ‘The Swiss are expecting little children, not a man like you.’
We finally arrived in Switzerland, in a place with a big castle. The Red Cross met us and gave us food and clothes. We looked at the little outfits; sizes for a baby. We were all too old; they were expecting tiny children, three or four years old, but we were grown boys, about fifteen or sixteen years old. Not children, not children, but boys, without mothers and fathers, boys from Buchenwald.
In Switzerland my father did the following:
He saw his first and most cherished film, The Best Years of Our Lives, about an American GI who loses his hands but finds his gal.
He ceased observing traditional Jewish law, even though he spent considerable time in an Orthodox camp in Engelberg where he was compelled to live a strictly religious lifestyle.
He learned to farm and wash huge quantities of dishes in the kitchen, all of
which was supposed to train him for migration to the nascent State of Israel.
He completed a technician’s course in a vocational school run by the Organisation for Rehabilitation and Training (ORT) in Geneva.
He skated on ice, just as he had done six years earlier in Wierzbnik.
And he danced, sometimes with Jewish girls, other times with non-Jewish girls, which fact he concealed from his more conservative and Orthodox brother.
Whether he lost his virginity during this time he refuses to reveal to me: Enough, enough already. I think Mummy is home now.
Mummy, his wife to be, my mother, was reborn in the American Occupied Zone of Germany, a territory which contained about twenty thousand Jewish Displaced Persons in 1945, most of whom originated in Poland. Landsberg was the site for one of many ‘Assembly Centres’, a euphemism for an enclosed camp which even the Allies had declared unfit for German prisoners of war. Yet conditions in Landsberg were considered privileged. Its 6200 Jewish interns had access to three cafés, a theatre, a radio station and a camp newspaper.
My mother did not live in the camp grounds, but resided with her aunt and uncle—her Ciociu and Wujciu. To her uncle, my mother has always been his dear Sura Gittl, her Yiddish name after her maternal grandmother. ‘My poor poor Sura Gittl,’ he says, before regaling her with fabulous stories about the time he stopped a Nazi battalion by biting the commandant on the toe; or strangled a Cossack with his bare hands. Our favourite is when he tells us how he personally visited Stalin, and threatened to court-martial him if he didn’t release Jewish prisoners at once. We have never believed him, but we listen anyway because he makes us laugh.
They lived in Landsberg in a private apartment on the Vorder-Anger Strasse, on the boundaries of the Landsberg Jewish community and the Assembly Camp. My mother was educated in a Hebrew school housed in a Lager barrack before attending the local German Lyceum, and joined a socialist Zionist youth-movement amongst whose members she celebrated the establishment of the Jewish State.
The Fiftieth Gate Page 20