Ester and Ruzya

by Masha Gessen

  These are the handbills posted by the Judenrat overnight. Until then, they had been trying to reassure the remaining forty thousand people that the ghetto would go on. There was hope: just a couple of weeks ago there were new orders for goods from the ghetto factories, one request coming from Berlin itself. There was the fall of Mussolini, first rumored, then confirmed, to their gleeful amazement. In fact, though, an entire month has passed since Barasz informed the Judenrat presidium that the Germans were choosing between keeping the Lodz ghetto and the Bialystok one and that he was not optimistic. Two days ago Gestapo footmen came to inspect the gates and walls, just as they had in February. And, just as in February, the Germans withdrew their watches, fixed or not, from the ghetto repairmen. The handbills, then, just confirmed what everyone already knew but no one really believed. Such is the condition of being among the last ghettos to be liquidated: the Jews do not need judenrein—“free of Jews”—explained to them.

  The other piece of paper is also a handbill.

  Fellow Jews! Fearsome days have come upon us. More than the ghetto and the yellow badge, hatred, humiliation and degradation—we now face death!… Fight for your lives until your last breath! Die like heroes!… Except for our honor we have nothing to lose!… Do not flee the ghetto unarmed, for without weapons you will perish. Only after fulfilling your national obligation, go to the forest armed. Weapons can be seized from any German in the ghetto. BE STRONG!

  Where do these young people think they live? They have created a separate world in their kibbutz and presume to teach others, out in the real world. The real world is here, in the ghetto, not outside, where Mussolini has fallen and the Red Army is advancing. Here in the real world, Jews with their children and their small bags are beginning to gather in the Judenrat garden, even though two hours still remain until the deadline. What did these youngsters think? That that stooped man with the wispy beard would abandon his daughter and go “seize” arms from the Germans? And have his child watch him die? This little man has no illusions. He knows what awaits him. He has an ambition: to hold his little girl’s bony hand all the way to the gas chamber, never to let it go. Could you ever be that strong, you who are so sure of what is right?

  There is a bang, the crackling of machine-gun fire, and the sky, within seconds, turns from pale gray to pink. The ghetto is in flames. The sound of gunfire and exploding grenades breaks out everywhere, and people are running, running from every direction. Nazis—German, Ukrainian, and Belarusian—move in from the ghetto fence, forcing the crowd accumulating in the Judenrat garden to contract until it is heaving, moaning, screaming, like a single human body in agony. Gestapo soldiers are running up and down the stairs of the Judenrat building. Someone shouts at Jakub that this is now the Gestapo headquarters. Before he is pushed away from the window, he sees the blonde girl running from the fire toward the crowd in the garden. She runs awkwardly, as chubby girls run, knees knocking, feet far apart, arms flailing out of sync. A pink chintz summer dress under an unseasonably warm coat, torn shoes, blood and filth on her face. And on her face, the expression of utter confusion, the question: “Why are you people going willingly to your deaths? Don’t you know the truth?” Jakub feels a pang of compassion for the girl. No one should learn about life by watching people die.

  NOVEMBER 3, 1943

  He has been lying awake on the bunk for some time when the guards call on the inmates to come out for work. It would be more accurate to say that he has been lying in the bunk, for it is a boxlike structure, with boards guarding the sides. It is shaped as though someone had planned to put mattresses on these boards, though certainly no one did. His body has shrunk over the last two years. It seems he is not only thinner but smaller of bone. His flesh has dwindled from lack of food; his bones must have shrunk from lack of air. But he always seems to stay one step behind the accommodations; the bunk in which he now lies might have been made with someone the size of his wife in mind. Angled by boards on every side, he feels like he has been forced into someone else’s coffin.

  The guard calls them out for work. They line up, as they do every morning, but now one of the guards begins to call out the names of all the thousand or so Jews in this camp, a labor branch of Majdanek. This lengthy procedure completed, several hundred of them are marched through the still-dark winter morning past what he thinks is the main camp. No breakfast today. That is, they will not get their half-liter of the marsh-colored brew they call tea for lack of another word. They stop at the end of the main camp’s biggest field, and the rows of men are told to take steps forward and back until they are standing in even rows, about two meters apart. They are given shovels and told they will be digging ditches. They begin to work, slowly, unevenly, silently, their silhouettes gradually turning from black to blue as the light turns an ever fainter gray.

  The grass is still green in places, elsewhere a dirty yellow, matted like hair, making it difficult for the dull shovel to cut through it. He stops working for a minute: he has just realized he can, for his punishment could only be getting shot a few hours before his time. The sky is endless, a filthy shade of blue, with contourless clouds that may be smoke. He allows himself a look behind, at the recently built crematorium. No, there is no smoke there. These are real clouds for once, and then there are the lower, black, groaning clouds that are crows. A shiny bluish black, they are almost pleasant to look at: they are the only thing in the entire landscape that does not seem a faded, tired color.

  He twists his body, to the extent that he still can, to look back at the fields of the camp. People are being shaped into columns and rows, endless columns and endless rows. He realizes, from the color of these human formations, that the people are naked. A bluish shape farther in the distance must be the other inmates looking on. In a hallucinatory close-up of a sort he has experienced lately, he thinks he has caught a glimpse of the blonde girl. But no, of course not, he cannot see any faces, much less hers.

  He saw her face in September, on the day when they led the last nine hundred people out of the mini-ghetto, the single block that had been left the Jews when the ghetto limits were redrawn the second time. He came out then with the rest of the Judenrat, at the head of the column, fully conscious of where they were going now, with their dignity intact and their consciences clear. He saw her distinctly among the Poles standing, watching, on the Aryan side. Her pudgy face was contorted in a square grimace, as though to say, “I told you so. Is this what you wanted?” Yes, he thought, this is what I wanted. I wanted to be with my people, safe in the knowledge that, unlike you and your kind, I never tried to save one of us over the rest. I tried to save us all To the extent that it was possible, I succeeded. We are the last Jews leaving the last surviving ghetto in this part of Poland. I know that your beloved Red Army is not far from here. And I would not mind finding myself in one of their jails now. But that is none of your concern.

  The dull blow of a rifle butt to the shoulder blade turns him back toward the ditch in the present. He looks down at his shovel. They are digging very narrow ditches, he and his fellow Jews. Space has continued to contract to the very end.

  These two accounts, then, are based on documents. Fridman and Feldman are composite characters created to avoid insulting the memory of real people. But other than that, the facts, such as they have been recounted and remembered, are there. They are reflected in the documents of the Judenrat and the memoirs of survivors. One survivor remembers my great-grandfather as an organizer of the resistance effort; another, as a deluded coward. A third says he was executed in the ghetto; others, that he was shot in Majdanek. He was not a coward, and he was not deluded. The rest of the facts would take Ester and Bella, and Ester’s children and grandchildren after them, years to learn, and then to learn to understand.

  Information came in snatches. In December 1944, around the time Bella’s first grandson was born, a woman named Regina Wojskowska contacted her in Moscow. A ghetto escapee, a partisan who went by the name Lena, she asked Bella to come to
a Moscow hospital where she was recovering from an operation on her arm. She said Jakub Goldberg had asked her to let Bella know he had helped the resistance in Bialystok. He had helped smuggle arms. He had not expected to survive, she said. He had told her where his daughter was studying in Moscow and asked her to get in touch. She did not know much more: her group had left the ghetto for the forest before the uprising.

  And there was a second woman. The name was Knazew; the year must have been 1946. She traveled to Moscow to be with her older son, who had gone there to study during the Soviet occupation of Bialystok. Her meeting with Bella, it seems, was accidental, though former Bialystokers in Moscow tended to travel in the same circles. Did she know anything about Jakub Goldberg? Yes, she had been his landlady.

  The Goldbergs’ Bialystok apartment was outside the Jewish neighborhood, so in the ghetto he rented a room from the Knazew family. They were transported to Majdanek at the same time, in September 1943, the Knazews, their ten-year-old daughter, and Jakub Goldberg. Upon arrival at the camp, the males and females were separated. They promised one another that whoever survived would try to find the others’ relatives and tell what he or she could. In March 1944, as the Nazis dismantled Majdanek before the Soviet troops arrived, Mrs. Knazew and her daughter, along with some thousands of other survivors deemed unfit for labor, were transferred to Auschwitz. Neither her husband nor Bella’s was in the transport.

  What else did she tell? That the rats that roamed the barracks in the night liked children’s cheeks, which retain fat even when the rest of the body has wasted away. That she was the only woman in her barracks who succeeded in staying awake all night every night guarding her child. But none of that had to do with Jakub Goldberg. What did she know about him? He was a member of the Judenrat. He spoke a lot of his wife and daughter. He was dead.

  The woman’s survival was a miracle of resilience, but once she was in Moscow with her two children, she could not manage. The Soviet regime considered prisoners of war to be traitors. The woman’s concentration-camp tattoo branded her unfit and undeserving. She could not hide it, and she could not keep a job, and after a couple of years she returned to Poland. Neither Bella nor Ester heard from her again.

  It was another thirty-five years before another story of Jakub came, brought by a third woman. The blonde girl.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  JANUARY 1982

  In Moscow, you can tell when a telephone call is long-distance: rather than the usual series of rings, it announces itself with a single trill that persists until the phone is picked up. Ester’s three matchbox rooms fill with anxiety at the sound, which does not subside when Ester hears Eda’s voice. Ester is still in touch with her college roommate, who returned to Poland thirty-five years ago. They write, and they see each other every few years, when Ester goes to Poland as a tourist. But they do not call very often. So this must be important, and it is immediately worrisome.

  “What happened?”

  “Nothing, nothing. Everyone’s fine. But there is a question. I had a phone call from someone in Israel who wants your phone number. Can I give it out?” Eda seems to think this is a dicey proposition. Ever since she returned to Poland, their friendship has been tinted with a certain condescension: Eda thinks of herself as living in the West, in civilization, in freedom, and assumes Ester to be contaminated with all the fears that burden regular Soviet citizens. One of them, it goes without saying, would not wish to receive a phone call from Israel. Diplomatic relations between the Soviet Union and Israel, rocky since the 1950s, were severed during the Six-Day War fifteen years ago, and the Soviet Union’s virulently pro-Arab foreign-policy stand has gone hand in hand with ever-increasing anti-Semitism inside the country. Contacts with foreigners, though not so dangerous as they were in Stalin’s time, are fraught with the risk of attracting the KGB’s attention; contacts with Israelis are still more perilous.

  “Yes, of course,” Ester answers. “What kind of question is that? Of course, give them my phone number. But who is it? Who wants it? Is it someone we know?”

  But Eda knows nothing—it may be someone from Bialystok, she thinks, but she is not sure—so they briefly exchange family news of health, household, and work problems. After they hang up, Ester wonders about the future caller, and she grows excited because she has not spoken to someone who lives in Israel in more than twenty years, since a Hebrew theater troupe performed in Moscow.

  APRIL 1982

  This time it is a local call, but the woman’s voice is foreign, almost indecipherable. It asks for Ester Gessen and proceeds, in mangled Polish, to introduce itself: Chaika Grossman, from Bialystok, from Israel, at the Hotel Ukraine.

  It is a nearly two-hour journey from the sleeping suburb of concrete-block high-rises where Ester lives to the Hotel Ukraine, a Stalin-era neo-Gothic skyscraper on the bank of the Moscow River. Ester overcomes the bus and the sleet and the subway and the long line at the shop to buy chocolates to bring with her and the long walk to the hotel and the inevitable humiliating examination by the concierge—all in a haze of anticipation. She recalls Chaika Grossman vaguely: they attended the same Hebrew gymnasium in Bialystok, but Chaika was a few years older. She was well respected, though, in Ha-Shomer ha-Zair, to which they both belonged. She was engaged to Meir Orkin, older brother of Malka, Ester’s best friend. Meir went to Palestine in the 1930s, but Chaika stayed to organize the Shomerite commune before they went over. Malka stayed behind too, and perished.

  They sit in Chaika’s room, two women around sixty, both a bit heavy, both in dresses a bit too bright and with voices a bit too loud. Ester assumed, for some reason, that Chaika would have a suite. Chaika assumed they would go to a café. No, Ester says, they would be unable to talk in a café. Chaika wrinkles her face, which is lined heavily, horizontally, in a way that lends itself to frowning smiles. They drink tea from heavy glasses supplied by the maid. Ester sits in the only chair. Chaika arranges herself on the bed like an oversize little girl.

  They speak a mixture of Polish, which Chaika has not used in more than thirty years, and Hebrew, which Ester has not spoken in forty. Chaika says she survived the war in Bialystok, took part in the ghetto resistance, joined the partisans in the forest. Ester says her father helped the resistance. Chaika says she moved to Israel in 1948, married Meir. They live on a kibbutz. She is a member of the Knesset, a socialist. She is here with an Israeli delegation invited by the Soviet Committee for the Defense of Peace. Ester frowns, says her socialist views have caved in to life in the Soviet Union. But this is not the point, she says, uncharacteristically sidestepping an argument. She wants to know about Israel, all about Israel. Chaika talks. She tells her the kibbutz is all they once dreamed about, but the country has many problems. She says she has drafted laws on abortion and the status of women and children. They talk into the evening, until Chaika is late for a reception. In Israel everyone is always late, she says, but it is time to go, and Ester rises.

  “Listen,” Chaika then says. “Aren’t you a bit surprised that there are so many people from Bialystok in Moscow, and of all of them I called you?”

  “I was just thinking that coming here,” Ester says. “Very surprised, yes. Why?”

  “Because in 1947 I was working at the Central Committee for the Jews in Warsaw, and we got your telegram.”

  “My God! To tell you the truth, I forgot all about it. That’s so funny.”

  “It was the only one we got from an individual, and I promised myself I’d find you.”

  “And a mere thirty-five years later—”

  “Here,” Chaika says, as Ester pulls on her heavy fur coat. “This is my book about the Bialystok ghetto uprising. I write about your father in it too.”

  Ester leaves the hotel weighed down by the book, a nearly five-hundred-page brick of a tome, by a sense of bemused envy at someone who is living out their common dream, and by the night, which descends with the heavy dampness of this very cold climate. She will proudly tell her Moscow friends about her
courage of thirty-five years ago: when she learned of the UN resolution allowing for the founding of the State of Israel, she sent a telegram of congratulations to the Central Committee for the Jews in Warsaw. Back then it was a reckless act that easily could have cost her her freedom. Now she shows off her reward: the book delivered by a woman who never forgot the telegram, or her, Ester Gessen, daughter of Jakub Goldberg. But the book is overlong and in Hebrew, and she is convinced her language skills are too rusty to make her way through, so the tome just sits there, out of sight of the casual visitor, for the next fifteen years, unread.

  AUGUST 1997

  In the United States for a holiday masquerading as a tour for my book on the Russian intelligentsia, I go to the recently opened Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., and wander into the gift shop on my usual quest for something Jewish for my grandmother Ester. A thick book with an amateurish blue-and-green cover catches my eye, and I can hardly believe my luck: it is an English translation of Chaika Grossman’s The Underground Army: Fighters of the Bialystok Ghetto. There can be no better gift than this, a chance for my grandmother—whose English these days is better than her Hebrew—to read about her father the resistance hero. I buy the book and, as soon as I am settled for the night in a friend’s home, start combing its 426 unindexed pages for my great-grandfather’s name.

  The head of the [Judenrat’s economic] department was one of the city’s well-known Zionist personalities, Goldberg, the father of a young girl, a member of the ken (Ha-Shomer ha-Zair branch) who had studied in Moscow during the Soviet era and remained there. I knew him, and he knew me. He was not too enthusiastic about Ha-Shomer ha-Zair but he thought its members nice children who, in the course of time, would awaken from their childish dreams. He related to his splendid daughter in the same way. He received me hospitably and I entered without waiting my turn and thought the matter arranged. To my great surprise he began to speak to me seriously.