Ester and Ruzya

by Masha Gessen

  Ester had other options, of course. But Boris was more interesting and better educated than all her other Biysk admirers—mostly very young Jewish mama’s boys with no experience in the real world. She tried not to compare him to Isaj: the sooner she killed off any lingering hope of ever seeing him again, the easier it would be to go on. She did not ask herself whether she could love Boris: that would have been too much like comparing him to Isaj. So she tried to evaluate the facts as they were. Boris’s was a touching courtship. His intervention in her persecution at the hands of Gurov was nothing short of heroic. His proposal, finally, promised a chance to leave Biysk in the foreseeable future: the Gessens were already making plans to return to Moscow.

  But what about Isaj? “I knew he did not survive,” says my grandmother whenever I ask her. How? She struggles to remember. She recalls lists posted in the Polish representative’s office in Biysk. Lists of Jewish survivors, posted as the cities were liberated. He was not on the list, and neither was Jakub. This is probably an altered memory, if not a false one, since Bialystok was not liberated until the summer of 1944—by which time Ester had already married Boris and followed him back to Moscow. There may have been lists compiled by partisans and Soviet parachutists who got to the area in December 1943; these would have included Jews who escaped the ghetto and death trains and hid with the partisans in the forests. There were a dozen or so such people from the Bialystok ghetto, but Isaj was not among them. About fifty years later Ester learned that Isaj’s best friend had managed to escape by jumping off a train headed for the death camps, and that Isaj had already been killed by then. Which means that Isaj was dead by mid-1943, although Ester could not have known it at the time. Yet she says she knew, and this is true: she simply knew. There was no singular moment of realizing the boy she loved was dead. There was no mourning. There was just a heavy, growing, and finally unyielding certainty.

  My grandmother Ruzya always says that her friend Ester “has a hero’s biography.” Foremost in her mind is Ester’s refusal to sign that piece of paper that would have made her a snitch. How many people could have faced down the threat of being beaten, jailed, shot? How many did? No one really knows how pervasive informing was in the Stalinist era: unlike East Germany, Russia has not released such records. If they exist, and if they are ever opened, the archives may reveal letters of denunciation from every city quarter, every building, and every other family in the Soviet Union: neighbors informing on neighbors, workers informing on their superiors, brothers informing on sisters, and wives on husbands. Several generations of Soviet children were weaned on the story of martyr Pavlik Morozov, a boy shot by his uncle for informing on his parents, who hoarded wheat during the forced collectivization of the late 1920s. Official Soviet folklore painted this betrayal as martyrdom, a feat any “honest girl and Komsomol member” should strive to imitate.

  “I held to this uncompromising position,” says my grandmother Ester, “but I should say that they exhausted and tortured me so much that if my mother had not supported this position, I am not sure I could have withstood it all. But my mother supported me in every way.”

  “But when you thought you were about to be shot, in that moment of panic, how did you keep from saying, ‘All right, fine, I’ll do it’?”

  “No, no, I am telling you, in these moments what held me back was the thought of how could I look my mother in the eye. How could I look her in the eye knowing that I had signed on with the NKVD, the organization we held responsible for my father’s death?”

  But here is where it gets tricky. “Did it ever occur to you,” I ask, “that if you signed, you might save your mother from being arrested again?”

  “No, no, that never occurred to me. And then, after a while, it had developed into such a routine, it wouldn’t have been fitting to give in after I’d held out for so long, so I didn’t consider it.”

  If my grandmother had signed, and if she explained her decision by telling me that she had wanted to save her mother from being arrested or that she had realized that her mother would not survive should she herself be jailed or shot, and therefore she had to sign, I would have accepted it without judgment. I would have said that when one is faced with the choice between one’s life and one’s conscience, one chooses life. But then one would not have a hero’s biography.

  “Why didn’t you consider,” I ask, “just signing that stupid piece of paper and then forgetting about it and never giving them any information?”

  “They said, ‘You just sign, then you won’t have to worry, we’ll tell you whom to watch.’ ” Meaning that it would not stop with the signing: she would be tied to the secret police from that point on. “And, you understand, I still considered myself a decent human being and I did not want to be implicated in all that for anything in the world.”

  There were, of course, people, even among her acquaintances, who thought differently. “I don’t want to name names,” says my grandmother, “but there was this man, the brother-in-law of a friend of mine, another exiled former Communist, who signed. He was dragged in just like I was, time after time, and he caved in. And he would raise the subject as though in an abstract way and say, ‘After all, one could sign and then never write any denunciations. One can stay honest even after signing.’ And I think that means—well, I don’t know, maybe he really never informed on anyone, but that he signed, I am certain.”

  That the man brought the subject up “in an abstract way,” as she says, probably means he was trying to warn his acquaintances against saying too much in his presence. They probably heeded the advice, but the man was not ostracized. The most remarkable thing about that story is that fifty-five years later my grandmother still would not name him. Maybe she is reluctant to judge, knowing precisely how difficult it was to stand her ground. Maybe she knows that in that situation, where the choice is no choice at all, no action can be condemned. Maybe she suspects that only a twenty-year-old could have possessed the sort of moral certainty that allowed her to stand her ground.

  She had, in the end, three options: keep going until Major Gurov succeeded in killing her; marry her savior and enlist his help in escaping from Biysk; or break the “routine” and sacrifice her very concept of right and wrong. Did the Germans, in murdering her fiancé, kill the romantic girl in her? Did the consideration of marrying without love seem insignificant when it made the difference between life and death? In any case, from the distance of fifty-five years, it does not even seem to matter. She was twenty-one years old when she married, a virgin, wearing her father’s size forty-five boots: she had long since worn out her only pair of shoes.

  PART FOUR

  JAKUB

  1941–1943

  Bialystok, 1941

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  My grandmother Ester does not have a clear recollection of learning of her father’s death. Just as with Isaj, it must have been a gradual, seeping sort of knowledge. There were letters she and her mother wrote to a town called Bogoruslan, where a data bank for people who lost one another in the war had been created. In the early days, when the front advanced hundreds of kilometers a week, when evacuations were sudden and haphazard, when some people fled while others were immobilized by fear, tens of thousands were lost. Many of them, it turned out, had the last name Goldberg. So there were letters from the wrong Yakov, Jakub, or Yankel Goldberg searching for his wife, Bella, and letters from the relatives of the wrong Yakov, looking for their cousin Haika or uncle Simon. About fifty letters in all, between 1942, when they first wrote to Bogoruslan, and 1944, when Bella left Biysk for Moscow, certain that Jakub was dead. Later—years and decades later—there would be people who brought bits of information that eventually added up to the story that Ester told.

  When I set out to write this book, I looked for documents that would fill out the story. I found more than I planned, mostly in vanity-press books printed in Israel, Australia, New York, and Poland. These are the traces of genocide inflicted on a people wedded to the written word: i
t seems virtually every survivor of the Bialystok ghetto has written a memoir. Jakub Goldberg was a prominent man in every way, and he figured in all of the memoirs. Some of these were written three or four years after the war; others, three or four decades. There were contradictions, of course. Ultimately, two entirely separate narratives emerged. I shall give both. And then I have my own version.

  AUGUST 1, 1941

  Jakub Goldberg walks back and forth, up and down the streets leading into the poorer, more crowded Jewish section of Bialystok, which is growing poorer and more crowded by the hour. His mission now is one of vague supervision, of aiding the semblance of order and peace, and every so often he succeeds in shooing or pushing one of the young Polish hoodlums away from the Jews’ possessions, arranged haphazardly in open carts and wagons and prams that squeak and stumble on the cobblestones. The street has grown so crowded with people and their objects and their shouts that it is becoming difficult to walk. Still, he is drawing simple satisfaction from walking in and out of what will now be the ghetto, past the people who are, under the supervision of another member of the council, already constructing the wooden walls. He is feeling, perhaps ever so briefly, a free man. All around him there are men—wealthier men and poorer men, men in good suits and men with the lining of their jackets visible where the cloth has worn through, men with beards in Chasidic dress and clean-shaven men in regular European attire. Upon closer inspection, no one looks exactly clean-shaven this morning, but in any case, it is not what differentiates these men from one another that strikes him; it is that they are all the same, the way they fret, the way they rush, the way they expose their hopes of saving their wives, their daughters, their linens, their clocks, their furs, and their furniture.

  He has no wife and no daughter. He does not even have his good suit or his warm coat. His wife took those in June, when the Soviets came to arrest them. They told her to pack, to put his clothes separately. “If I have to pack separately, I’m not coming with you,” she declared to the NKVD officer in charge of the arrest. Even Jakub was surprised. The officer drew back, as one would from a small dog that has unexpectedly snarled and started nipping at ankles. She did look like a tiny Jewish terrier, his wife. “Fine, pack everything together,” the officer granted. Bella packed Jakub’s suit and coat, his good shoes, his stockings and hers, all the underwear in the house, her clothes, and the only valuable thing in the entire place: the silverware her brother-in-law had deposited with them before returning to Warsaw to fetch his pregnant wife. They climbed into the car, Bella and Jakub with the suitcase, and the Soviet officer with his soldier, and in a few minutes the car stopped in front of the city jail. The soldier pushed Jakub out before getting out himself, and the car drove off toward the station, taking his wife and his winter coat.

  He has no clothes now and no obligations. No wife to save. With any luck, she has long since arrived in Siberia. And if she has not, there is nothing he can know, much less do. No daughter to fret about: she has been in Moscow for a year. One year today, in fact. He no longer has to worry about why she is or is not writing: there have been no letters in over a month, and there will be none, not from one side of the front to the other. He no longer has to pack parcels for the brothers and in-laws (including the father-in-law who disowned him for taking the train on the Sabbath) in the Warsaw Ghetto, now that Jakub is becoming a ghetto resident himself. No debts to pay: those who may have been dogged enough to continue demanding payments have all either been deported to Siberia, back when the Soviets went after the businessmen, or perished in the fire the Nazis set to the synagogue after herding two thousand Jews inside on June 27, or been shot in the Pietrasze Forest a week later. For the first time in thirteen years, if he has a payday, he will not have to start it by sharing with his creditors.

  His two closest friends were killed in the forest, along with two hundred other Jewish intellectuals. This, too, is a sort of freedom. He has only strangers to worry about anymore. Do that bearded man’s five children have enough bread on the table? Whether they ever did before is irrelevant. Certainly, if the man’s children did not go hungry before—and judging from the thin shine of his jacket, they probably did—the last two years under the Soviets have introduced all of them to days without bread and to nights spent in food queues. But now that Efraim Barasz, the engineer who seems to have been appointed head Jew in town, has picked Jakub Goldberg to take charge of rationing for the Judenrat, the ghetto’s Jewish council, he will make sure that the Jews, as long as there are any Jews, have bread on their tables.

  He was an odd choice. In the prewar kehilla, the Jewish community council, in the endless conflicts between the Bundists and the Zionists, Jakub Goldberg raged against the socialists’ unceasing attempts to bail out the poor at the community’s expense, to force the council to give handouts rather than help. Maybe this was why Barasz chose him: Jakub is not a man of handouts. He is a man of logic and rational decision making, one who will not be influenced by the hungry eyes of children, especially since he no longer has any.

  Out of the corner of his eye he spots the boy—Isaj, his daughter’s boyfriend, the small and excessively animated character. Jakub should not feel happy to see him. He disliked his conspicuous poverty and the smell he brought into their house, the noxious odor of the leather factory where the boy worked. His overwrought ways annoyed Jakub, whether because his passion came from a different, pathetic world, or because it engulfed his daughter so completely. Where is the boy rushing to now? His family already lives within the new ghetto’s limits, so they do not have to move. He is probably on a social mission of imaginary importance, as is always the way with members of the Zionist youth organizations.

  He is relieved to have seen the boy. He has wondered about him lately. When he heard that, during the synagogue fire, some young man climbed up to a window inside the sanctuary and knocked out several panes of glass just to be able to scream “murderers” at the Nazis, Jakub’s first thought was of Isaj. That screaming boy was immediately shot by the Germans; he fell to the ground but survived by crawling away in the smoke. Or so they said in the streets. No one knew who it had been, though, and Jakub is pleased to have seen Isaj running. This one did not fall from any windows.

  AUGUST 3, 1941

  He did not expect to see Fridman entering his office at the Judenrat. Surely this textile tycoon—one of the few who managed to avoid deportation to Siberia, for what that sort of luck is worth now—surely he can get by without Jakub Goldberg’s hunger rations. Fridman came into the office fuming, such a big cloud of hot air emanating from such a small man, and Jakub told him to take his place in line. He is not sure what made Fridman assume he was entitled to enter without waiting his turn: his riches or the shared fact of their biographies, the four days in NKVD custody a month and a half ago, in another era. Now Fridman reenters, none the more contrite for having spent two hours among the hungry pleaders in the hallway. Jakub sits down behind his desk, signaling the discussion will be formal, an exchange between an official and his constituent, not between two citizens of equal standing, whatever that might now mean.

  “To what do I owe the honor?”

  “The restaurants you’re setting up—”

  “The canteen. The canteen I have set up.”

  “Well, you do not expect us to, surely—”

  “Of course not,” says Jakub, beginning to see the purpose of this discussion. “Of course, if you have other means of procuring food, as I am sure you do, you will not be forced to eat at the canteen. And cooking facilities. Surely your wife will not be among those setting up fires on the sidewalk. You understand this is a hazard.”

  “But my business is no more, you know that.”

  “Then you are, of course, welcome to eat at the canteen. All residents of the ghetto will receive their ration cards. Those working outside the ghetto, and other groups, as outlined in yesterday’s Judenrat announcement, will be entitled to additional food allowances.”

  “But I
cannot,” Fridman sputters, apparently stymied by Jakub’s refusal to grasp the issue at hand. “I cannot eat with them, with my workers, all them—”

  “You do not wish to eat with the hoi polloi, then?”

  “It is more than just me. I have a letter from the business community.”

  “Very well,” says Jakub, skimming the letter, suddenly inspired. “I see I am going to have to set up a separate, uh, eating facility. Of course, you understand you will have to share in the expense of this undertaking?”

  “Of course.”

  He will. He will set up a separate canteen for the rich, and he will charge them money for the same thin soup and slice of bread that he gives to the poor. He is a free man, Jakub Goldberg, neither indebted nor elected, and he has only so much bread to distribute, and he will not let it go to waste.

  NOVEMBER 29, 1942

  The twenty-four members of the Judenrat are in their regular meeting, and its agenda, more than anything else, illustrates what they now consider regular and routine. It has been over three weeks since all the other ghettos in the district were liquidated. The victories of their chairman, Efraim Barasz, are evident. First, he managed to convince the Germans that the Bialystok ghetto was still useful to them. Second—and this is, incontrovertibly, a miracle—he secured the return of three hundred young girls who were deported for work on the potato harvest in October. They were taken off a Treblinka-bound train and returned to the ghetto two weeks ago, ending their mothers’ squealing demonstrations outside the Judenrat building but overwhelming the ghetto with the fear of death they brought back with them. To make matters worse, the ghetto gates were locked for three weeks, until just the other day, making the daily ghetto-wide bickering all the more desperate. Now the Germans have ordered the ghetto grounds reduced by about a third. Jakub is concerned that his vegetable gardens will be sacrificed. He had high hopes for using the vegetables next year. He had high hopes for next year, period. What will happen first—the Nazis ordering the liquidation or the Jews, fed up, starting to kill one another? Consider the influx of refugees who have entered the ghetto—escapees from the liquidated ghettos, from the Treblinka trains. There are now several thousand. How is Jakub supposed to feed them? How is the Judenrat supposed to hide them, to ensure the security of the rest? Berel Subotnik, another presidium member, asks whether the ghetto police should start denying entry to the escapees.