by Masha Gessen
Rabbi Rozenman, who almost never speaks, rises with evident difficulty. “Our people, throughout history, have done everything possible to save other Jews.” His speech is slurred, probably because he has already handed over his gold teeth, and his matted yellowish gray beard muffles the sound. He struggles to enunciate the way an old man in worn-out shoes struggles not to shuffle. “At the very least, Jews did nothing to harm one another. We now know that, in all probability, our ghetto, too, will be liquidated. The Jews should go down helping one another.”
Hear, hear. They are unanimous now, and they go on to an easier subject: tax collection. The Germans have demanded another five million rubles from a ghetto they have very nearly milked dry.
“I demand the most severe of penalties for those who evade taxes!” Subotnik is spitting through his thick lips. “Arrest and isolation! And we must post announcements of the penalties imposed!”
“I second that,” says Jakub. “I would also like to point out that the poor residents of the ghetto have been responding to the collection, while the rich have been doing everything to shift the burden to the poor.” His wife and daughter should hear him now. He is becoming a regular socialist.
FEBRUARY 10, 1943
First there was a suicide. Cwi Wider, a member of the Judenrat, killed himself. It turned out he had been involved in resistance organizing, had been hoping for some sort of uprising. Then, on Monday, the massacre began, and then there was an attempt at an uprising. There were women who shouted obscenities at the Nazis. There was a family that poured boiling water on the Nazis. There was a young man, Itzhak Malmed, who threw a lightbulb filled with acid at a German policeman, blinding him. The German spun around, crazed, and shot, killing his own partner.
The Germans came to the Judenrat building and told them they would kill a hundred Jews they had rounded up if the council did not produce the offender. Barasz dispatched emissaries to all the youth groups, and soon Itzhak gave himself up. As two Germans were setting up the gallows, another pair were beating the young man. He shouted, “I don’t regret it! You will pay for your actions!” He continued for a long time. He shrieked in complete sentences, that boy. It must have been a prepared speech. Jakub walked away after they knocked the stool out from under the boy’s feet: he had observed several hangings, and this time he wanted to get away before the corpse’s intestines began to void.
Instead of returning to the Judenrat building, Jakub went to a cellar that night, one of many cellars into which the ghetto inhabitants tried to disappear. He told himself he was going because the murder was indiscriminate by now and the Judenrat building no longer offered any protection. That may or may not have been true, but it was not the reason. It was the nausea that came when the Judenrat busied itself looking for Malmed, the same feeling that gathered in his throat every time they started doing the math: give up six thousand, save fifty thousand, give up this one boy, save a hundred people. This time the nausea, the painful lightness in his forehead, would not abate, not until he got himself out of the Judenrat building and into the cellar. It was the end of the fourth day of the massacre.
Jakub walked to the basement of the building where he has been renting a room. His people are dying, and that can only mean that he has failed them. If they hate him for it, he expected nothing else. Still, he had to go somewhere and there was no reason to believe he was any less likely to be lynched there than in other basements—and at least there was logic to his choice.
He was not attacked, physically or verbally. He was ignored. The old man who could not stop coughing was suffocated with a pillow. So was a crying baby. But Jakub Goldberg, member of the Judenrat, was ignored in a way that seemed to say “You are not making a sound and therefore not harming us now, and we haven’t the strength to punish people for past sins.” He stood—the basement’s few boxes and barrels suitable for sitting on were occupied—and thought, and enumerated his sins. Sin number one: unlike Cwi, unlike Itzhak, unlike so many of them, he was alive. Sin number two: he had taken part in drawing up the list again, the list of the twelve thousand the Germans demanded this time. He used the same criteria as the first time: there was a new generation of the infirm and mentally unbalanced to sacrifice.
It is Friday morning, and the Germans have not shown up in the ghetto. The murderers had been punctual if not methodical: in the ghetto by seven, out at five. By mid-morning the inhabitants of cellars and attics begin to believe the massacre is over. They come out crawling, then speed up as their numbers increase, until the ghetto seems filled with running, screaming, flailing madmen, each searching for his dead.
Jakub’s legs are stiff after a night spent standing up. In any case, he has no reason to run instead of walking. He has no one to look for. This is not true. As he works to distill his motives, he knows he is searching for the boy, his daughter’s boyfriend. Looking at the corpses in the streets is no use: the Nazis used dumdum bullets and aimed for the head, so these are anonymous dead, bodies with necks and, sometimes, lower jaws; past that it’s bloody pulp, now covered with a thin layer of snow. As the bodies are dragged away to the pile in the cemetery, they leave fading red tracks.
Jakub wanders into the early February dusk. It has been raining for over an hour. The bloodstains on the ground have all but been washed away. Jakub’s clothes are soaked, and his face is wet, so he does not know whether he has tears of his own. As he nears the cemetery, he sees a group of Ha-Shomer ha-Zair members gathered around a fresh mass grave. He studies the crowd carefully. His daughter’s boy is not among them. Isaj’s best friend, Jakub Makowski, is standing a few feet away from the crowd, not slumped exactly but smaller somehow, visibly alone. Isaj is dead. And Jakub Goldberg is a free man.
His legs are much less stiff now, unlike his trousers, with the frozen rainwater, and he knows where he is going and why. His conversation with Daniel Moszkowicz is brief, like a transaction between businessmen who are too weary to detail their obvious mutual benefit. If Moszkowicz’s people will help outfit trucks bringing food into the ghetto with hidden compartments, Jakub will ensure that their arms or whatever else they are bringing into the ghetto passes securely. They shake hands, and Jakub walks slowly back to the Judenrat building, the four-story stone structure that used to make them so proud because it housed the Linas Hatsedek, the health service with the fastest ambulance in Poland.
AUGUST 17, 1943
In this hail of bullets, there will be a separate one for him. It began in much the same way as in February, except this time they knew it was the end of the ghetto—and of its inhabitants. People hid in cellars and attics, and the Nazis flushed them out, herding them into Jakub’s vegetable garden until they were trampling one another to death. There have been fires and there has been fighting. The resistance learned its lessons from the Warsaw Ghetto, and so did the Germans. The Bialystok fighters were better armed, but the Germans were much better prepared. They forced the confrontation into open spaces, where the fighters could do little other than die with honor. Still, some of them, cut off from the rest, were herded into the transport crowd, which has now been removed to Pietrasze Field—whether for execution or for death camp presorting, he does not know. But for Jakub, the Germans seem to have reserved a separate fate. They have led him out of the Judenrat building for execution. So they know about those dual-cargo trucks. How very fortunate. He dies a free man, and his executioners know this. He is free even of his fiercest secrets, then. Not a bad end, under the circumstances.
The facts, such as they are, are in that narrative. And in this one.
JUNE 23, 1941
“Goldberg!” he hears, followed by a thin laugh somewhere behind the clanking of the locks on the door. An interrogation, finally, he thinks. Good. Let’s get this started. He tries to get up and falters. His body is too large to use the tiny metal bed even to launch from. The steel chain-link under the thin mattress sags nearly down to the floor under his weight; his shoulders fold in to accommodate the shape of his iron cri
b; his feet stick ridiculously up from the sharp edge at the bottom of the metal bed. He reaches down to the floor with his hand to push himself out of the bed trap.
“Yankel!” It is the same voice from the other side of the door, where the lock continues to clank unrhythmically. Since when do Soviet officers call Jews by their Yiddish names? He has grown accustomed to his own official “Yakov” of the last two years. The door finally creaks, then opens with a heavy slam against the outside wall. Feldman, a leftist Zionist arrested four days ago, along with hundreds of other political activists of every sort, stands in the opening, a crooked, grinning smile pushing apart his gray-stubbled cheeks. “You are a free man again, Comrade Goldberg,” he says. “The guards have abandoned the jail.”
The guards have abandoned the jail, the Soviets have abandoned the town altogether, the people have abandoned the streets. Not since the Germans came into Bialystok nearly two years ago has the place been so empty, the air so thin and gray. Except, that is, for the two thousand men in the streets, the just-sprung inmates, most of them headed toward the poor Jewish quarter while a few others, like Jakub, are walking slowly down other streets to get to their homes. He walks on the pavement, as he always did when he was with his wife. The road is littered with objects that must have fallen off the fleeing Soviet jeeps: a bureau drawer that split upon hitting the ground, a child’s stuffed donkey, a paper bag burst to expose tire-flattened onions.
He heard what sounded like an air battle two nights ago and assumed it was the Soviets’ exercises. No such luck. There has apparently been fighting in the air, bombs dropped on the town. It looks, from this distance, like a couple of houses must still be smoldering in the Jewish neighborhood. He recalls an old Jewish joke. A man about to be beheaded suddenly turns to his executioner and asks, “What day of the week is it?”—“Monday.”—“What a way to start the week.” Only Feldman could have called what they are now, on this Monday, “free.” Out of one jail and into another. God knows, he has learned enough about what happens to Jews under Germans over the past two years, reading letters from the Warsaw Ghetto. Four days ago he was a man with a wife, a daughter, a home, and hopes, even if they had devolved into avoiding arrest and seeing his daughter again. Now he will go to his empty house, wait for the new jailers to come in, hope for the old ones to return. One’s aspirations have a way of shrinking.
SEPTEMBER 21, 1941
The twenty-four members of the Judenrat, gathered in the mercifully dim room in what used to be the Jewish hospital, are composing the first death list. He knew, from what he had heard of Warsaw and Lodz, that this would happen sooner or later. The Germans picked their first ten thousand victims almost at random but, thankfully, without Jewish assistance. Now they want twelve thousand names for a transport to Pruzhany. Presumably, to death.
“Jews, we must refuse to be the tools of their selection.” That is Pejsach Kaplan, the editor of the daily Unzer Lebn. A thin, dry man with a square face and perpetually burning eyes. A tireless idealist. “I understand we have no choice but to draw up some list, but we should draw it up without making a choice. A lottery would be appropriate.”
“This is no time to start shirking our responsibilities.” Jakub stands up to speak. “Remember, please, that by creating a death list we are drawing up a list of the fifty thousand who will go on living. This is not a lottery. I can tell you who is more likely to survive, and I can tell you who will die within weeks no matter what we do.”
It goes on for hours, and then it is decided: the sick, the hopelessly hungry, the deeply impoverished, the inhumanly crowded, will leave the ghetto. The presidium stays in the hall to go over lists. They are drawing on Jakub’s rationing lists, the food and heat distribution charts. They can find only about four thousand hopeless cases. The remainder will have to be selected at random, but the five men cannot bear the apparent cynicism of creating a lottery. The alphabet will have to be their only criterion. The Polish alphabet, as it happens. They take two thousand As and resolve to convince the Germans to halve the requirement. The next day, Chairman Barasz negotiates a miracle by assuring the Germans that the rest of the ghetto population is essential for the functioning of the many factories he is setting up to aid the German war effort. Only a few souls over five thousand go on the transport. Jakub’s rolls are relieved of the most hopeless cases, so he can better help the living.
DECEMBER 30, 1941
By the time Jakub arrives at his office on the top floor of the Judenrat building in the morning, the two benches in the corridor opposite his door are occupied. People are sitting on the benches, leaning on the backs of the benches, standing in front of the benches talking with those sitting, discussing rumors of a cut in the necessary workforce, an increase in the numbers—they are saying women will be drafted for labor more and more—another tax collection. Well, yes, the tax collection, he can confirm that one. Some are here to plead their case before the announcement even goes up: there is no way they can give up their fur coats now, they will say, not in the winter. How is he to make them understand that they will never be able to wear those coats around the ghetto without getting beaten or worse? And then the women who absolutely have to have an additional ration for their children, who are starving. All the children are starving. He spots the blonde Grossman girl. She appeared in the ghetto within the last week, out of nowhere, it seemed, confident, careless, a woman who too obviously came on a mission. He knows why she is here: she wants papers showing that the kibbutz run by the chalutzim (pioneers)—her young group—is a charity kitchen. If this means they will at least feed themselves and save him twenty-five rations, he will sign anything. If only he could have some assurance they will not try to do something stupid, something that could cost other people’s lives. He waves the girl into his office.
He believes this discussion should be formal. He walks behind his desk and pulls up the wooden chair. Why is it that the less freedom you have the smaller is your furniture? This chair must have been made for cheder students. His legs bent uncomfortably, his back forced erect, supporting himself on the desk with his forearms, he addresses the girl.
“You know that I know you and your family, and I trust you,” he begins. “I shall therefore speak frankly. I have been a Zionist and I remain a Zionist. The pioneer Zionist movements are very precious to me. I think we must help the pioneers maintain themselves. It’s true I was never overenthusiastic about the kinds of foolishness you taught my daughter, with all your communist ideas. I am sure, however, that you are good Jews. But all kinds of rumors have reached me to the effect that you are spreading false information and calling on the Jews to act stupidly and irresponsibly, to make war. Is that true? Have you become Communists and partisans? Are you waiting for the Red Army, eh?”
The girl turns red. Beet red, as blondes can. “Who are you to tell me what is true? Here you are, sitting in your imaginary kingdom, distributing food rations to the Jews, thinking you have the power. How can you hate Communism so much that you are blind and deaf to what the Germans have done elsewhere? Do you know about Slonim? Liquidated! I should throw the German rations, the hunger rations for the Jews, at your feet!”
There is no point in arguing with someone who comes with a prepared speech, he realizes. And he cannot refrain from answering. “I understand that is what you have come to do. I can assure you I will find mouths that will be grateful for that food.”
“You think you are so important! That you can make or break people by giving them a crust of bread! And you call yourself a Zionist, but you think the pioneers are just children at play. Do you even know what a pioneer is? You never even understood your own daughter!”
“What I understand about my daughter is that she has curly brown hair and swarthy skin. And she couldn’t, if the end came, go over to the Aryan side like you will. And if she were here and you were trying to pull her into whatever it is you are thinking up, I swear, I would strangle you with my own two hands.” He looks down at his hands on the
desk and sees white knuckles and veins purple and thick under the hair. He tries to pull back, forces the back legs of the silly little chair down to the floor. The girl, he realizes, is also trying to step back from the confrontation.
“I don’t know what you think we are doing,” she says. “We are running a kibbutz. Do I look like a partisan to you?”
“No, no. I trust you, of course: you are the daughter of Nachum Grossman.”
He pulls the charity-kitchen papers out of his desk drawer, already stamped and signed, and hands them to the girl, who mumbles a thank-you, either grudging or embarrassed—he cannot tell which.
AUGUST 16, 1943
Jakub stands at the window, holding two pieces of paper, rereading them by the pale early-morning light.
Bialystok is becoming judenrein. All are required to vacate their houses by 9 in the morning. Each Jew is allowed to take along one small hand-carried bag.