Holocaust

by Gerald Green

  Sasha smiled at me. “Sorry I never met him. Maybe someday. I’ll see if we have anything to help you sleep. You may have to settle for the last of the cognac.”

  They left. Helena crouched in a corner, wiping her tears away.

  “Come to me,” I said.

  She got up, came to the cot, and sat beside me again. Even in bulky winter clothing, felt boots, she was beautiful. Her hair had been cut short. Her face had seen no makeup for years. And still she shone, a woman to be stared at, desired, loved.

  “Oh, Rudi… you could have died. And for what?”

  I held her hand. “To show them we are not cowards. That they can’t keep killing us and get away with it.”

  “But they are killing millions, we know it. And so few fight, so few escape.”

  “All the more reason for us to fight them.”

  We said nothing for a while. She rested her head on my chest, and I stroked her cropped hair, kissed her ear. Each move sent a jolt of pain through my shoulder and arm, but at least the bleeding seemed to have stopped.

  “Tell me again how much you love me,” I said.

  “More than ever.” Then she began to cry again. “But they’ll come looking for us. They’ll know where we are. Someone will tell, someone will be tortured. Then we will all be—”

  “You once said we’d never die.”

  “I don’t believe it any more,” my wife said.

  “We’ll live, you’ll see. You’ll meet my parents, Karl, Inga. And they’ll all love you as much as I do. They’ll joke about a Czech in the family, but it’ll just be a joke.”

  She smiled at last, stroked my forehead. I was afraid then, afraid of dying, and so was she. We loved each other too much. The enemy would make sure that our love would be killed. But we dared not tell each other how afraid we were. It was wrong of me to talk about my family, and happy reunions. It made it harder to deceive ourselves.

  Finally, she looked up. “Rudi, I have something to ask of you.”

  “Anything.”

  “The next time you go out to fight with Sasha and the men, I want to go along.”

  “Oh, no.”

  “Some of the women do. Nadya does.” “Not my wife.”

  “But I must. I must be with you all the time.”

  Her eyes were solemn, shadowed. It had been four years that we had been together, and it was a lifetime. We had suffered much, seen horrors, survived, fought, and learned to be passionate, tender, understanding. And most of all to read each other’s minds. We could hide nothing from each other, nothing. I knew what she meant. There was a good chance the Nazis would catch us someday. They and their local allies were determined to wipe us out. It was reported that a Waffen SS battalion, had been brought into the area, to find us and crush us.

  Our luck might run out someday. Helena was telling me—I knew it, I saw it in her face—that she wanted to die with me.

  “I’ll talk to Sasha about it,” I said.

  Sasha came in with the cognac. He patted Helena’s head. “Visiting hours are over. Patient has to get his sleep.”

  For reasons that I still do not understand, my brother Karl was permitted to live for several months in the isolation of the Kleine Festung.

  In that curious, unpredictable way in which the Nazi bureaucracy worked, both he and Frey were beaten from time to time, and Frey died after a few weeks. But Karl stayed alive—barely—in a dark cell. He was almost a skeleton, his eyes unaccustomed to light, his voice reduced to a croak. And his hands, the hands of an artist, were two deformed lumps of flesh and bone.

  One day the guard came and unlocked his cell.

  “Let’s go, Weiss.”

  “Don’t beat me again,” he begged. “I’ll die this time.”

  “No more beatings. You’re luckier than your friends Frey and Felsher.”

  “You killed them.”

  “They wouldn’t talk.”

  “I won’t either.”

  The guard shrugged. “Who cares any more? They’re sending you to Auschwitz. Lovely place, nicer than here. A family camp. They treat the Jews better there than the Germans get treated in Berlin.”

  Some truly lunatic business followed. Karl was marched into the office of Commandant Rahm and made to sign a “confession” admitting certain crimes against the Reich. Rahm said that when the war ended, he, Karl Weiss, artist of Berlin, Jew, would have to stand trial for “serious crimes against the German people.” Karl signed. What did it matter? He was already one of the, walking dead—what long-term inmates called a “Mussulman.”

  Then he was told he had a half-hour to see his wife before being put aboard the transport for the “east.” Theresienstadt was now in the process of being emptied. Every day trains left for some destination in Poland. It was Auschwitz, of course, and everyone was assured it was a “family camp,” that there they would be joined—parents, children, old folks—and be given fruitful work, good food, a decent home to live in.

  When Karl staggered into the studio for the last time, Inga let out a cry. His striped uniform hung loosely on his frame. He was bearded, hollow-eyed, bent over like an aged cripple. Spittle kept forming in the corners of his mouth.

  She hugged him. Maria Kalova and a few of the artists who had not been involved in the conspiracy came forward.

  “Oh, they have let you free, Karl,” Inga said. She and Maria led him to a chair, found some tea for him. He tried to hide his hands when they offered him the metal cup.

  “Oh, my beloved Karl,” she cried. “What they have done to you … your hands.”

  The others were ashamed to look on. They moved away. Maria went to her drafting table. The SS kept them at work turning out “morale” posters, warnings to behave, promises of wonderful days to come.

  “I am still alive,” Karl said. His voice was lost, distant. “I never told them. Are the paintings safe?”

  “Yes,” she whispered. “Maria and I hid them.”

  He nodded. “I’ll never paint again. They made sure of that.”

  Inga grasped his broken hands and began to kiss them.

  “You can’t make them well again. The way my mother used to kiss my bruises when I was a little boy. It didn’t work then.” He looked at his hands. “They say one gets used to it. But you never do.”

  “Don’t talk about it.” On her knees, she put her face against his hands.

  “In the Kleine Festung, to keep from going crazy when they beat us, Frey and Felsher and I kept shouting that we would go to Italy. Florence, Venice. Frey insisted on Arezzo, too.”

  “We’ll go there, dearest Karl, I promise.”

  He shivered, hunched over, rested his head on her yellow hair. “We will never see Italy as man and wife. My brief moments of courage are over.” He sat up. “They’re sending me to Auschwitz. They’re finished with me. I suppose I’m not even worth killing, the way they murdered Frey and Felsher.”

  “You won’t leave,” she said. “If they send you, I’ll go also.”

  He shook his head.

  Maria Kalova left her table and walked over to them. She looked at them for a moment, then said: “You can’t, Inga. You must tell Karl.”

  “Tell me … ?”

  “At least, here in Theresienstadt, you have a chance, Inga,” Maria went on. “You can work, they will spare you, but…”

  “What are you talking about?” asked Karl.

  Inga looked up at him. “Karl. Your child is in me.”

  “Child … ?”

  “Ours.”

  He began to tremble again, shoved the teacup away, held her at arm’s length. His arms were like thin pipes. “No. You mustn’t have it.”

  “But I will. That is why Maria says I must stay here. Children have been born here. At least there is a clinic, and they will look after me.”

  “I’ve seen the children born here,” he said. “They’re cursed for the rest of their lives. Their eyes show it.”

  “It need not be that way.”

  Mari
a stepped forward. “The women will protect Inga, as long as they can. We’ll be good to the child.”

  “No,” my brother said. “If you love me, end its life before it opens its eyes in this damned place.”

  “No, I won’t. I want your blessing. I want you to sanctify its life. Oh, Karl, I sometimes think I am more of a Jew than you, or Rudi…”

  “I want no child born here.”

  “The rabbis say each life makes God’s name holy. Please, Karl.”

  “They did not see Theresienstadt.”

  Maria said, “Karl, she is right. You must let Inga have her baby.”

  He lowered his head to his hands. “All right. It doesn’t matter. It’s a child I’ll never know.”

  Inga said, “But you will. I promise you.”

  A kapo entered, stopped in the doorway. He was rounding up people for the transport. He said nothing.

  Karl looked at him, got slowly to his feet. He whispered to Inga, “When the child is old enough, show him the paintings. So he will understand.”

  They kissed for the last time.

  “Goodbye, my beloved wife,” he said. “Perhaps all will go well. Perhaps they are telling us the truth. I’ve been saved at Buchenwald and at Theresienstadt because I could paint. Perhaps it will happen again.” Then he looked at his clawlike hands and laughed bitterly.

  She would not let him go, kept kissing him.

  Finally, Maria had to separate them, as the kapo, slapping the truncheon against his leg, entered the studio.

  “You must let him go, Inga,” Maria said.

  “Goodbye, Karl. Goodbye, my love.”

  They watched as he was shoved into a line of confused, frightened people—the once privileged inmates of the “Paradise Ghetto”—destined for the death camp. The guards ordered them to march off.

  My parents were in Auschwitz. But Uncle Moses, now an active member of the Jewish Fighting Organization, had escaped the roundups. There could not have been more than fifty thousand Jews left in the ghetto, from a peak population of almost half a million. And those that remained were ill, hungry and terrified.

  On January 9, Himmler visited the ghetto to see with his own eyes the pitiful remnants of European Jewry. He ordered a final total liquidation. Every last Jew was to be sent to Treblinka or Auschwitz.

  The Jewish Fighting Organization, numbering about six hundred activists, but supported by perhaps a thousand other “irregulars,” decided to make a stand when the next roundup occurred. It was becoming harder and harder for the Germans to deceive the Jews. All the promises of family camps, the bread-and-marmalade, were now known to be lies.

  On a day in mid-January, my Uncle Moses and Aaron Feldman, pretending to be peddlers, shoved a pushcart toward a section of the wall that had been evacuated.

  A ghetto policeman warned them that there would be a curfew in ten minutes.

  Uncle Moses tipped his hat. “Yes, sir,” he said. “We’re just getting our merchandise home. Pots and pans, you know.” Then he whispered to Aaron, “Don’t worry. He was bribed.”

  As dusk fell on the wintry, deserted city, the man and the boy approached the wall.

  Aaron leaped onto the cart, and with the aid of a grappling hook and a rope, scaled the wall. He kneeled on the top and whistled softly.

  Two men from the Polish resistance—one was the man named Anton—ran from a doorway. They tossed a wooden crate to Aaron, who in turn dropped it to the cart below. The procedure was repeated with a second crate.

  Then Aaron slid down the rope. Uncle Moses put the crates under the dirty canvas covering his “wares” and they started back to the resistance headquarters.

  “You’re late,” the ghetto policeman said.

  “My apologies,” Uncle Moses said. And as he walked by, he bribed him a second time.

  In these final months of the ghetto, whole neighborhoods had been emptied—the inhabitants either wiped out, or shipped to their death. It was in secret apartments in these areas that the so-called “illegals” now lived, the resisters, the fighters, the ones determined not to be led away praying and weeping.

  To an apartment on the upper floor of what appeared to be an uninhabited building, Uncle Moses and Aaron carried the crates they had gotten from the Poles. It was a piddling contribution. No section of the resistance, the various Zionist groups, the Bundists, the left, had been able to make a dent on the Christian Poles. Some sympathy, yes. But little in the way of arms.

  Eva Lubin and some others were present as they opened the crates. There were five new revolvers in one, and ammunition for them. There were also grenades.

  “How do we start an uprising with these?” Moses asked.

  “It’s a beginning,” Eva said. “Let’s start loading them.”

  They began inserting bullets into the revolvers.

  “If we can kill a few,” Eva said hopefully. “Then get their machine guns, their rifles. To add to our small arsenal. We might make an impression.”

  “I’m not sure they’ll oblige us,” Moses said. “The word is they are going to bring in Waffen SS and Lithuanian auxiliaries. A building-by-building sweep. We may be too late with this.”

  Moses picked up two guns, twirled them. “I’m not a very convincing cowboy. I wasn’t meant for this sort of thing. Jews and guns don’t seem to go together.”

  There was a signal-type rap at the door—two short raps, a pause, then three more. Moses nodded at Aaron to unbolt the door.

  Zalman entered, out of breath, covered with dust. He had crawled through mounds of rubble to reach them.

  “The SS has blocked the street,” Zalman said.

  “The roundup?” Moses asked.

  “Yes. Von Sammern’s announced it. The last of the Jews are to come out.”

  “But why here?” Uncle Moses asked. “This is a deserted neighborhood. It’s supposed to be empty.”

  “They may have followed you and the kid.”

  Moses took command. “Pack everything. Everyone take a gun. Grenades in pockets. Hide the crates. We’ll leave by the rooftops.”

  As they obeyed his orders, they heard German voices below, boots kicking against doors, orders being shouted.

  “Jews out!”

  “All Jews out!”

  “Come quietly, we mean no harm!”

  Aaron ran from the room and peered down the stairway. Far below, on the ground floor, he could see three soldiers kicking in doors. Thus far they had found no one. The building, except for the apartment in which the fighters were hiding, had long been deserted.

  Aaron and the others could hear the voices.

  “What the hell are we looking for in this dump?”

  “Someone said the Yids are supposed to have stolen guns.”

  Moses ordered everyone to stay in the apartment. He sent Eva and Zalman and Aaron into closets and the adjacent room. He himself wedged behind the door.

  They could hear the Germans outside the door.

  “Go on, you’re always bragging what a hot shit you are.”

  “Bust it in, they’re only fucking Jews.”

  “Think I’m afraid? Afraid of Jews?”

  Boots, rifles, heavy bodies slammed against the bolted door. It splintered, gave way. The Germans entered the room.

  Moses came from the corner and shot the first man in the face from a distance of no more than a meter. He fell, his face a crimson splotch.

  The other two, before they could aim their rifles, were hit by a hail of bullets from Eva and Zalman.

  One, less badly wounded, dragged the other out to the stairs.

  Zalman took the machine pistol from the dead soldier’s hands. Aaron ran into the hall, threw a grenade down the stairwell. The soldiers lurched, stumbled, rolled in gray-green heaps to the ground level.

  The Jews looked at one another in amazement.

  “They ran,” Moses said wonderingly. “My God, they ran. At last I’ve seen it. They bleed and die and they are frightened—like us.”

  Aaron
flew down the steps and yanked the arms and ammunition belts from the other two soldiers, then raced back up the stairs.

  In the room, Zalman made a decision. “All of us out. They’ll be back in force. Across the roofs. I’ll go first.”

  Heavily armed now, they fled down the corridor, and climbed the metal ladder to the rooftop door.

  All over the city now, sporadic fighting had broken out. Anelevitz himself had led an attack on a party of Germans escorting Jews to the Umschlagplatz. With five grenades, five pistols and a few Molotov cocktails, they had won a partial victory, liberated some Jews.

  Still, the Germans managed to deport 6,500 Jews during this January battle. But it was far less than they had anticipated.

  All over the ruined city, new leaflets from Lowy’s old press began to appear, to encourage the Jews to fight.

  The German occupying forces have begun the second stage of extermination!

  Don’t go to your death without a fight! Stand up for yourselves!

  Get hold of an ax, an iron bar, a knife—anything—and bolt the door of your houses! Dare them to try and take them!

  If you refuse to fight you will die!

  Fight! And fight on!

  After the firelight at Moses’ apartment, and several other battles throughout the city, some of the resistance fighters assembled at another apartment. There they learned that many of their comrades were dead. The Germans had been fought off at the Toebbens workshop in the center of the city, but at a high cost in Jewish losses.

  In the second flat, Moses’ group was met by others. They distributed the machine pistols and the rifles they had gotten in the first battle.

  Aaron, at the window, saw a truck of SS soldiers enter the street. The truck emptied, but this time the Germans were cautious, hugging the sides of the buildings, wary of fire.

  Zalman demonstrated the machine pistols to the others. “Don’t aim it like a rifle,” he said. “Just spray shots.”

  “I want one,” Aaron said.

  Moses patted his head. “Wait till you grow up.”

  Moses was at the window. He saw the SS men spreading down the street. He smacked a hand in his fist. “By God, the time has come to fight them on our ground.”

  As he spoke, four Germans entered the building.