I realize in that instant the reason Minka has never spoken of her experience during the war is not that she has forgotten the details. It’s because she remembers every last one, and wants to make sure that her children and grandchildren do not have to suffer the same curse.
She sits back down on the couch. “I don’t know what you want me to say.”
I lean forward and take her hand. It is cool and dry, like tissue paper. “Tell me more about your father,” I suggest.
PART II
When I reach the age of Twenty
I will explore this world of plenty
In a motorized bird myself I will sit
And soar into space oh! so brightly lit
I will float, I will fly to the world so lovely, so far
I will float, I will fly above rivers and sea
The cloud is my sister, the wind a brother to me.
—from “A Dream,” written by Avraham (Abramek) Koplowicz, b. 1930. He was a child in the Łód ghetto. He was taken from the ghetto on the final transport to Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1944 and was murdered there at age fourteen. This poem has been translated from the original Polish by Ida Meretyk-Spinka, 2012.
What they had told me of the upiór could not be true. The whip wielded by Damian had lashed open Aleks’s back, so that his skin hung in ribbons, and he was bleeding. How could a monster with no blood of his own do that?
Not that it mattered. The crowd had turned out to watch the punishment, to revel in the pain of the creature that had caused them so much misery. In the moonlight, sweat gleamed on Aleks’s body, twisting in agony as he strained against his bonds. The villagers threw water in his face, vinegar and salt in his wounds. A light snow fell, blanketing the square—a bucolic picture postcard, except for the brutality at its center.
“Please,” I begged, breaking free from the soldiers who were restraining the onlookers, so that I could grab Damian’s arm. “You have to stop.”
“Why? He wouldn’t have. Thirteen people have died. Thirteen.” He jerked his head at a soldier, who caught me around the waist and held me back. Damian lifted the whip again and sent it whizzing through the air, cracking against Aleks’s flesh.
It did not matter, I realized, if Aleks was even to blame. Damian knew the village simply needed a scapegoat.
The cat’s-eye tail had opened a gash along Aleks’s cheek. His face was unrecognizable. His shirt hung in shreds at his waist as he sagged to his knees. “Ania,” he gasped. “Go . . . away . . .”
“You bastard!” Damian shouted. He hit Aleks so hard in the face that blood sprayed like a fountain from his nose, that his head snapped back on the stalk of his neck. “You could have hurt her!”
“Stop!” I shrieked. I stomped as hard as I could on the foot of the soldier who was restraining me, and threw myself on top of Aleks. “You’ll kill him,” I sobbed.
Aleks was limp in my arms. A muscle jumped along Damian’s jaw as he watched me try to bear the weight. “You can’t kill something,” he said coldly, “that’s already dead.”
Suddenly a soldier burst through the seam of the crowd, skidding in the snow to salute Damian. “Captain? There’s been another murder.”
The villagers parted, and two soldiers stepped forward, carrying the body of Baruch Beiler’s wife. Her throat had been torn out. Her eyes were still open. “The tax man, he’s missing,” one soldier said.
I stepped forward as Damian knelt beside the victim. The woman’s body was still warm, the blood still steaming. This had happened moments ago. While Aleks was here, being beaten.
I turned back, but the ropes that had held him a moment ago were slack, curled on the snow like vipers. In the blink of an eye, all the time it took the murmuring crowd to realize that a man was wrongly accused, Aleks had managed to escape.
MINKA
My father trusted me with the details of his death. “Minka,” he would say, in the hot summer, “make sure there is lemonade at my funeral. Fresh lemonade for all!” When he dressed up in a borrowed suit for my sister’s wedding, my father said, “Minka, at my funeral, you must be sure I look as dapper as I do today.” This upset my mother to no end. “Abram Lewin,” she would say, “you’re going to give the girl nightmares.” But my father, he would just wink at me and say, “She is absolutely right, Minka. And for the record, no opera at my funeral. I hate opera. But dancing, now, that would be nice.”
I was not traumatized by these conversations, as my mother thought. How could I be, knowing my father? He owned a very successful bakery, and I had grown up watching him load loaves into a brick oven in his undershirt, his muscles flexing. He was tall and strong and invincible. The real joke behind the joke was that my father was too full of life to ever die.
After school, I would sit in the shop and do my homework while my older sister, Basia, sold the bread. My father didn’t let me work at the cash register, because school was more important to him. He called me his little professor, because I was so smart—I had skipped two grades, and passed a three-day exam last year to get into Gymnasium. It had been a shock to find out that even though I qualified, I was not accepted to the school. They only took two Jews that year. My sister, who had always been a little jealous of the premium placed on my intelligence, pretended to be upset, but I knew deep down she was happy that finally I would have to work a trade, just like her. However, one of my father’s customers intervened. My father was such an accomplished baker that beyond the challah and the rye and the loaves that every Jewish housewife bought daily, he had special clients who were Christian, who came in for his babka and his poppy-seed cake and mazurek. It was one of these clients, an accountant, who intervened so that I could attend the Catholic high school. During religious hour, I would be excused from class to do my homework in the hall, with the other Jewish girl who attended. Then after school, I would walk to my father’s bakery in Łód. When the shop closed, Basia would go home to her newlywed husband, Rubin, and my father and I would walk through the streets to our house, in a neighborhood mixed with Christians and Jews.
One evening, as we were walking, a phalanx of soldiers marched past us. My father pushed me into the hollow made by a doorframe to let them pass. I did not know if they were SS, or Wehrmacht, or Gestapo; I was a silly girl of fourteen who didn’t pay attention to that. All I knew was that they never smiled, and they moved only at right angles. My father started to shield his eyes from the setting sun, and then realized that his gesture looked like a Heil, their greeting, so he pulled his arm down to his side. “At my funeral, Minka,” he said, without a hint of laughter in his voice, “no parades.”
• • •
I was spoiled. My mother, Hana, cleaned my room and did all the cooking. When she wasn’t fussing over me, she was needling Basia to make her a grandmother already, even though my sister had only been married for six months to the boy she’d been in love with since she was my age.
I had friends in my neighborhood—one girl, Greta, even went to my school. Sometimes she invited me to her home to play records or listen to the radio, and she was perfectly nice, but in school, if we passed in the hall, she never made eye contact with me. That’s just the way it was; Polish Christians did not like Jews, at least not in public. The Szymanskis, who lived in the other half of our building and invited us for Christmas and Easter (when I would stuff myself with non-kosher food), never looked down on us because of our religion, but my mother said that’s because Mrs. Szymanski was not a typical Pole, but rather was born in Russia.
My best friend was Darija Horowicz. We had been in school together until I passed the entrance exams, but Darija and I still managed to see each other most every day and fill in all the details we’d missed about each other’s lives. Darija’s father owned a factory outside the city, and sometimes we would take a horse and buggy out there to have picnics by the lake. There were always boys buzzing around Darija. She was beautiful—a tall and graceful ballet dancer, with long, dark eyelashes and a little bow of a mouth. I
was nowhere near as pretty as she was, but I figured the boys who buzzed around Darija couldn’t all have her as their girlfriend. There would be some heartbroken fellow left over for me, and maybe he would be so taken with my wit that he wouldn’t notice my crooked front tooth or the way my belly pooched out a tiny bit in the front of my skirt.
One day, Darija and I were in my bedroom, working. We had a Grand Plan, and it involved the book that I was writing. Darija was reading it, chapter by chapter, and making corrrections with a red pen, which was what we thought an editor would do. We were going to move together to London and live in a flat, and Darija would work at a publishing house and I would write novels. We’d have fancy cocktails and dance with handsome men. “In our world,” Darija said, throwing aside the chapter she was marking up, “there will be no semicolons.”
It was one of our favorite pastimes: reimagining a world run by Darija and myself that was perfect—a place where you could eat as many kaiser rolls as you wanted without getting fat; a place where no one took mathematics in school; a place where grammar was an afterthought instead of a necessity. I looked up from the notebook in which I was scribbling. “Seems indecisive, doesn’t it? Either be a period or be a comma, but make up your mind.” The chapter I had been working on for the past hour was only a few sentences long. Nothing was coming to me, and I knew why. I was too tired to be creative. My parents had been fighting last night, and woke me up. I could not hear all of their argument, but it was about Mrs. Szymanski. She had offered to hide my mother and me, if need be, but couldn’t take all of us. I didn’t understand why my father was so upset. It wasn’t as if my mother and I would ever think of leaving him.
“In our world,” I said, “everyone will have an automobile with a radio.”
Darija flipped onto her belly, her eyes lighting up. “Don’t remind me.” Last week we had seen an automobile pull up to Wodospad, a fancy restaurant where once I had seen a movie star. When the driver got out of the car, we could hear music wafting from the inside, seeping into the air and lingering like perfume. It was a wonder to think about having music with you as you traveled.
On that day I had also noticed a new sign on the restaurant: Psy i Żydzi nie pozwolone.
No dogs or Jews allowed.
We had heard stories of Kristallnacht. My mother had a cousin whose shop had been burned to the ground in Germany. One of our neighbors had adopted a boy whose parents had been killed in a pogrom. Rubin kept begging my sister to go to America, but Basia wouldn’t leave my parents behind. When she told them that we should move into the Jewish area of the city before things got worse, my father said she was too excitable. My mother pointed to the beautiful wooden buffet table, which must have weighed three hundred pounds and which had belonged to my great-grandmother. “How can you grab a suitcase and pack up your life?” she asked my sister. “You’d leave all your memories behind.”
I know Darija was remembering that sign on the restaurant, too, because she said, “In our world, there will be no Germans.” Then she laughed. “Ah, poor Minka. You look like you’re going to be sick at the very thought. But then, a world without Germans is a world without Herr Bauer.”
I put aside the notebook and inched closer to Darija. “Today, he called on me three times. I’m the only one he picked more than once to answer a question.”
“That’s probably because you raised your hand every time.”
That was true. German was my best subject in school. We had a choice of taking French or German. The French teacher, Madame Genierre, was an old nun with a giant wart on her chin that had hairs growing out of it. On the other hand, the German teacher, Herr Bauer, was a young man who looked a little like the actor Leon Liebgold if you squinted or just daydreamed excessively, as I was wont to do. Sometimes when he leaned over my shoulder to correct gender agreement on my paper, I would fantasize how he might take me in his arms and kiss me and tell me we should run away together. As if that would ever happen between a teacher and a student, or a Christian and a Jew! But he was easy on the eyes, at the very least, and I wanted him to notice me, so I took every class he offered: German Grammar, Conversation, Literature. I was his star pupil. I met with him during lunch, just to practice. Glauben Sie, dass es regnen wird, Fräulein Lewin? he would ask. Do you think it’s going to rain?
Ach ja, ich denke wir sollten mit, schlechtem Wetter rechnen.
Oh yes, I think we should expect bad weather.
Sometimes, he would even share a private joke with me in German. Noch eine weikere langweilige Besprechung! Yet another boring meeting, he would say in passing, smiling pleasantly, as he marched beside Father Jankowiak down the hall, knowing that the priest could not understand a word he was saying, but that I did.
“Today I made him blush,” I confided, smiling. “I told him I was writing a poem and asked him how you might say, in German, ‘He took her in his arms and kissed her breath away.’ I was hoping maybe he’d show me, instead of tell me.”
“Ugh.” Darija shuddered. “The thought of a German kissing me makes my skin crawl.”
“You can’t say that. Herr Bauer, he’s different. He never talks about the war. He’s far too much of a scholar for that. Besides, if you lump them all together because they’re German, how does that make you any different from the way they lump us all together just because we’re Jews?”
Darija picked up a book from my nightstand. “Oh, Herr Bauer,” she cooed. “I’ll follow you to the ends of the earth. To Berlin. Oh wait, that’s the same thing, isn’t it?” She mashed the book up against her face and pretended to kiss it.
I felt a flash of annoyance. Dariya was lovely, with her long neck and her dancer’s body. I didn’t make fun of her when she strung along several boys at once, who’d flock around her at parties and vie for the honor of getting her some punch or a sweet.
“It’s just as well,” she said, tossing the book aside. “If you start running around with the German professor, you’re going to break Josek’s heart.”
Now it was my turn to blush. Josek Szapiro was the one boy who didn’t look twice at Darija. He’d never asked me to take a walk with him or complimented me on a sweater or how I fixed my hair, but the last time we had gone on a picnic to the lake near the factory, he had spent a whole hour talking to me about my book. He had recently been hired by the Chronicle to write and was almost three years older than I was, but he didn’t seem to think it was foolish to believe I could one day be published.
“You know,” Darija said, pointing to the pages she had been reading, “this is really just a love story.”
“So what’s wrong with that?”
“Well, a love story, that’s no story at all. People don’t want a happy ending. They want conflict. They want the heroine to fall for the man she can never have.” She grinned at me. “I’m just saying that Ania’s boring.”
At that, I burst out laughing. “She’s based on you and me!”
“Then maybe we’re boring.” Darija sat up, crossing her legs. “Maybe we need to make ourselves more cosmopolitan. After all, I could be the kind of lady who’d drive to a restaurant in a car with a radio.”
I rolled my eyes. “Right. And I’m the queen of England.”
Darija grabbed my hand. “Let’s do something shocking.”
“Fine,” I replied. “I won’t hand in my German homework tomorrow.”
“No, no. Something worldly.” She smiled. “We could have schnapps at the Grand Hotel.”
I snorted. “Who is going to serve two little girls?”
“We won’t look like little girls. Can’t you steal something from your mother’s closet?”
My mother would kill me if she found out.
“I won’t tell her if you don’t,” Darija said, reading my mind.
“I won’t have to tell her.” My mother had a sixth sense. I swear, she must have had eyes in the back of her head, to be able to catch me sneaking a taste of the stew from the pot before dinner was served, or to know when
I was working on my story in my bedroom instead of doing my homework. “When she has nothing else to worry about, she worries about me.”
Suddenly, from the living room, there was a shriek. I scrambled to my feet and ran, Darija at my heels. My father was clapping Rubin on the back, and my mother was embracing Basia. “Hana!” my father crowed to her. “This calls for some wine!”
“Minusia,” my mother said, using her pet name for me. She looked happier than I had ever seen her. “Your sister is having a baby!”
It had been strange when my sister moved out after her wedding, so that I had my own room. It was stranger now to think of her as somebody’s mother. I hugged Basia and kissed her on the cheek.
“Oh, there’s so much to do!” my mother said.
Basia laughed. “You have some time, Mama.”
“You can never be too prepared. We’ll go out shopping tomorrow for yarn. We must start knitting! Abram, you’ll make do without her at the cash register. Which, you know, is not a good job for a woman who’s expecting. Standing there all day long with her back hurting and her feet swollen—”
My father exchanged a look with Rubin. “This could be a vacation,” he joked. “Maybe for the next five months, she’ll be too busy to bother complaining about me . . .”
I glanced at Darija. Who smiled, and raised her brows.
• • •
We looked like two children playing dress-up. I was wearing one of my mother’s silk dresses and a pair of Darija’s mother’s pumps, and the kitten heels kept getting stuck between the cobblestones on the street. Darija had done up my face with makeup, which was supposed to make us look older but which made me feel like a painted clown.
The Grand Hotel rose above us like a wedding cake, with tiers upon tiers of windows. I imagined the stories going on behind each one. The two people in silhouette on the second floor were newlyweds. The woman staring out from the third-floor corner suite was remembering her lost love, whom she would meet for coffee later that afternoon, for the first time in twenty years . . .
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