Ester and Ruzya

by Masha Gessen

  So far so good. This is a description of Chaika’s coming to see my great-grandfather to receive a charity-kitchen permit for the ghetto kibbutz, which served as a front for a resistance organization. I am pleased the book mentions even my grandmother, and as I turn the page, I anticipate the earnest account of a conversation between allies who come to a common cause from different backgrounds and views. I expect Goldberg to express his support conspiratorially but decisively, and the incredulous narrator to accept it with gratitude. The entire book is written in the explicitly ideological language familiar to me from my Soviet youth, so I expect my great-grandfather to be woven into this heroic narrative in a stilted but definitive way.

  Instead, he tells her to give up the silly attempts to start unrest in the ghetto, and she describes him, in this book written about seven years later, the following way.

  His narrow-mindedness, stubbornness and blind hatred of communism were all leading him astray. He apparently believed that the Germans were not really so bad.… He was satisfied, too satisfied … that little man … to the end he would consider himself one of the elect and forget that it was the Nazis who had chosen him and granted him his imaginary power. He was actually only an emissary, their small and despicable servant. To the end of his days and to the last Jew, he would think that someone could hide himself from the Jewish tragedy and continue to live during the great holocaust.

  Two hundred and fifty pages later, there is this description.

  It was again a summer day. A wide gate opened on Fabryczna Street, long lines stretched through the gate and beyond. They were Jews, well dressed. They walked slowly, with dignity, without children, almost without any packages. I looked closely: Barasz was marching in the front row, with his wife at his side. His gray head could be seen from afar. Goldberg, and Marcus, the commander of the Jewish police, the whole Judenrat, and after them more hundreds of Jews, all dignitaries: former heads of the factories, leaders of the Judenrat departments, police officers. There was a wire stretched down in the middle of the street. Barasz tripped, and almost fell. He bent over, lifted the wire, and threw it aside. Once again he walked slowly, dignified and erect. The company came closer. Sentries walked along the sides of the street and took care that we did not come too close. The company covered the whole of Fabryczna Street and came to the railway, to the industrial station. Barasz looked around and did not see those standing on the aryan side of the street, watching. He looked ahead as if his eye had been caught by some distant point on the blue horizon. They marched silently. No one wept, no one cried—no one attempted to escape.

  And so were led to Majdanek the last of the Jews, who had lived an illusion.

  NOVEMBER 1999, BIALYSTOK

  I have lunch at New York Bagels across the street from the Cristall Hotel. Leonard Cohen is dancing to the end of love on the stereo; framed posters on the walls feature bagels, the Chrysler Building, and the Statue of Liberty. All of this, like my glossy new hotel, is geared to the homesick Jewish home-seeker of the sort that come here by the tens of thousands from America, Israel, Australia, every summer. The hotel, as it happens, is on one side of the street that used to have the wooden fence dividing it down the middle; the Bagels is on the ghetto side.

  I came by train from Warsaw, getting in yesterday after dark. I wanted to see Ester’s beloved Bialystok, and I was hoping to find a local historian or, better yet, a contemporary who remembered the ghetto and Jakub and could talk to me. This was something of an unfounded hope. The Bialystok entry in the Encyclopaedia Judaica indicates that “after the war there remained 1,085 Jews in Bialystok, of whom 900 were local inhabitants, and the rest from the neighboring villages. Of the ghetto inhabitants, 260 survived, some in the deportation camps, others as members of partisan units. The community presumably dwindled and dissolved.” Some presumption. On the train on the way here I read Jewish Bialystok and Surroundings in Eastern Poland, written by local journalist Tomasz Wisniewski, one of a score of ethnic Poles throughout this country who have fashioned their fascination with the gap of history into an avocation. He maintains a database of archival mentions of Bialystok Jews. Tomasz’s Jewish Bialystok says that there are five Jews living in Bialystok now. Professor Adam Dobronski at the Bialystok branch of Warsaw University tells me that, unfortunately, “they have been dying off,” and now there are one and a half Jews in the town: one Jew and another one, who is married to a Catholic and does not consider himself Jewish. This is my first trip to a place where the number of Jews is known precisely.

  None of the very few survivors of the Bialystok ghetto lives in the town: most of them settled in Israel. The resident Jews, all one and a half of them, are not native Bialystokers, so I do not go to see them. Instead, I walk around a lot. This is a small town, but by no means a backwater. There are something like 280,000 residents, screeching traffic, busy young people, and, even more noticeable, scores of flashy fashion shops serving them. There is no sense of absence, no conspicuous empty space, and the Jewish memorial boards scattered throughout the center of town are overshadowed by store displays. It all reminds me of a line from a Brodsky poem: “Life without us is, darling, thinkable.”

  I continuously refer to Tomasz’s guidebook—the most essential of guidebooks, for it leads the reader through the invisible, from the site of the burned-down synagogue to the city park that was once a Jewish cemetery. His book is also a work of glorified history, the sort that appears in the absence of eyewitnesses. It claims, for example, that Bialystok was exempt from the anti-Semitism and pogroms that swept through Poland in the 1930s. When I meet him, Tomasz also tells me that he believes there is no anti-Semitism in Poland now. Though on each of the occasions when I have visited Poland I have always heard anti-Semitic taunts, I do not argue but ask him, instead, whether he knows if the building on Zlota Street, where my grandmother grew up, still stands. Yes, he says, he has even attended parties there. He draws a map, and I set off.

  This is a mystical, slightly nerve-racking pilgrimage, the freezing walk up the long Sienkiewicz Street. In Moscow I live just up the street from the building where my grandmother Ruzya grew up and then raised my mother, and I bike or drive past it regularly, but I have never tried to enter: it seems a regular part of the landscape, as accidental to my family’s history as we are to this building’s. But the building on Zlota Street fascinates me as a survivor of an annihilated world that is entirely foreign to me.

  Guided by Tomasz’s map, I find a grayish squat two-story structure of sandstone with the date 1928 inscribed under the gable. I mill around in the fenced-in yard, miraculously unnoticed by the puss-eyed German shepherd, until a young woman and her small daughter enter the gate.

  “Do you live here?” I ask.

  “Yes.”

  “I think my grandmother lived in this building before the war.”

  “You should speak to my aunt, but she is not home now.”

  “Does she live on the ground floor?”

  “Yes.” The woman is in her mid-thirties. She has raggedy blond hair and crooked teeth. “Come here tomorrow at noon,” she says, then, as I turn to go, suddenly tenses up. “You are not trying to take the place back, are you?”

  “No, no, my great-grandfather was just a tenant.”

  I go back the next day, but before I do, I e-mail my grandmother, who is in the United States visiting her children, and she writes back that this is the wrong building. Danuta Kossakiewicz, the young woman’s aunt, tells me the same thing. She is in her sixties, heavyish, dyed blond, and she gives me tea and a jellied-meat dish, and tells me the house I seek was razed nine years ago. She even tracks down one of the former tenants for me to talk to, a certain Kozlowski, but I decide not to venture so far afield: I wanted to see the house, not hear about it. Instead, I walk in what used to be the courtyard where the right house used to stand: if you look carefully, you can see that it is still marked off by larger trees, surrounding the not-quite-empty space of younger, sticklike growth. The building was
torn down to make way for apartment blocks, five stories and with panels of poisonous yellow. I walk across the street to my grandmother’s Hebrew Gymnasium, a forbidding modern building that now serves as a hospital, and then I go talk to local historians.

  There is precious little information I can find in Bialystok, but I do see a photograph of Jakub in Tomasz’s files, and Tomasz promises to copy it for me. My grandmother has only two pictures: a group one of the Jewish council and a beach photo, in which her father, skinny and happy, is half turned away from the camera. In the 1950s she had an old Jewish photographer, a specialist in the trade, make a manifold enlargement of her father’s face from the group photo. She then had the image transferred to an oval ceramic tile to put on Bella and Jakub’s gravestone—a Russian tradition. Jakub has no grave, of course, but he and Bella share a tombstone at a Moscow Jewish cemetery. I look at the picture every September 2: I drive Ester to the cemetery on the anniversary of her mother’s death. The image is so blurry that it has never helped me imagine Jakub. I just knew, from listening to my grandmother, that he was handsome and very, very tall. Now I know that he was plain big, at least in the late 1930s: broad-chested, square-headed, proud and confident, judging from the posture.

  I accumulate a heap of books and Xeroxes—the printed memories of a Jewish Bialystok and its demise. Refoel Rajzner, a survivor who lived in Australia, wrote that Jakub Goldberg was shot on the second day of the ghetto uprising in August 1943. According to Chaika Grossman as well as that Knazew woman, he was shot in Majdanek during the mass execution of Jews there on November 3, 1943. Rajzner’s assertion, probably based on rumors of the sort that feed all closed communities, is almost certainly erroneous.

  I learn that Jakub was a member of the Judenrat presidium, in charge of rationing and heat distribution. That he operated two canteens serving identical fare, one for everyone and one for the rich. That he was well respected. Pejsach Kaplan, editor of the Yiddish-language daily Unzer Lebn, a man far to the left of my great-grandfather, wrote in his diary: “The council made a Herculean effort to obtain food and distribute it as equitably as possible. Often, some people had to go hungry. But everything humanly possible was done to provide sustenance to the greatest number. The Rationing Department … also controlled heating supplies.”

  I learn that the Judenrat made the Bialystok ghetto population more useful to the Germans than perhaps any other ghetto: twenty different factories operated at one time. That the Judenrat managed to keep the Germans largely out of the day-to-day operations and maintenance of the ghetto. In a large, poorly lit basement room in the city courthouse, amid dust-covered cardboard binders, I find Woldemar Monkiewicz, an old, nearly blind historian, prosecutor, and the chairman of a Bialystok-region committee investigating Hitler-era crimes. “If it weren’t for the Judenrat,” he says, “it could have been like [in the nearby town of] Tykocin, where all the Jews were exterminated within two months.”

  I learn that there were about three hundred participants in the ghetto uprising, that they came from competing organizations, and that they did not trust one another. This would explain how someone like Chaika Grossman could be convinced that Jakub Goldberg staunchly opposed resistance efforts while someone like Regina Wojskowska said that he had helped. Monkiewicz, who has been researching Bialystok ghetto history most of his life, thinks the details of underground organizing are probably impossible to reconstruct. “The Communists think they organized the resistance,” this former Communist says with obvious disdain. “But the Communists are the ones who survived because they joined the Soviet partisans in the forest before the uprising.” And the dead, for the most part, are silent. According to an article written by Monkiewicz, “Jakub Goldberg, a Zionist activist, was among those who cooperated with the Jewish Fighting Union,” which “brought weapons and ammunition into the ghetto in the hidden compartments of trucks.” He can no longer recall what his sources were for that statement: one interview or another, or someone’s handwritten memoir.

  In 1944, when Regina Wojskowska told Bella that her Jakub had been a member of the Judenrat and helped the resistance, that information did not yet contain an apparent contradiction. History had not been written.

  Seventeen years later, in 1961, came the Eichmann trial in Israel, where the attorney general, Gideon Hausner, extolled the heroism of the ghetto fighters, who, he said, “redeemed the honor of our people” with their deaths. Even more important for creating the Judenrat/resistance dichotomy was Hannah Arendt’s report on the Eichmann trial. Arendt condemned the Judenrats as the most insidious of the forces that came together to kill the Jews. “Without Jewish help in administrative and police work … there would have been either complete chaos or an impossibly severe drain on German manpower,” she wrote, adding later in the text: “The whole truth was that if the Jewish people had really been unorganized and leaderless, there would have been chaos and plenty of misery but the total number of victims would hardly have been between four and a half and six million people.” The numbers had not yet hardened, but the historical evaluation was taking definite shape: the resisters, hopeless as their cause may have been, were the unquestioned heroes; the Judenrats, the collaborators, very nearly the murderers of their own people.

  Arendt allowed that there were different Judenrats, or at least different Judenrat leaders: “They ranged all the way from Chaim Rumkowski, eldest of the Jews in Lodz, called Chaim I, who issued currency notes bearing his signature and postage stamps engraved with his portrait, and who rode around in a broken-down horse-drawn carriage; through [Berlin’s] Leo Baeck, scholarly, mild-mannered, highly educated, who believed Jewish policemen would be ‘more gentle and helpful’ and would ‘make the ordeal easier’ (whereas in fact they were, of course, more brutal and less corruptible, since so much more was at stake for them); to, finally, a few who committed suicide—like Adam Czerniakow, chairman of the Warsaw Jewish Council, who was not a rabbi but an unbeliever, a Polish-speaking Jewish engineer, but who must still have remembered the rabbinical saying: ‘Let them kill you, but don’t cross the line.’ ” Half the Jews would have survived had it not been for the Judenrats’ effective organization of their slaughter, estimated Arendt. That made the Judenrats, in her estimation, responsible for, say, three million deaths.

  Arendt’s report caused an uproar: one Jewish newspaper nailed her as a “self-hating Jewess.” Still, her portrayal of the Judenrats stuck. Not all historians agreed, of course. In 1972, New York historian Isaiah Trunk published Judenrat, a six-hundred-page study. He argued that, in the early years of the ghettos, the Nazis’ ultimate goal of annihilating the Jews was not self-evident and that even later the hope of saving at least some of the Jews did not appear unfounded. Nor was the goal of making marginally tolerable the Jews’ last days, months, or years a dishonorable one. They were not, after all, marched straight from their homes to the gas chambers. The road to death was a slow crawl from the home to the ghetto, through the ghetto factories and sometimes labor camps. All along this journey there was a hope, if not of ultimate survival, then of reducing the misery. Though hope may not be the point: that journey, which lasted, in some cases—as in the Lodz ghetto, for example—as much as five years, was life. Every day of this life, people ate and relieved themselves and someone tried to make sure they had something to eat and the plumbing was working to flush the excrement. (The failure to maintain the plumbing in working order led to one of the most often cited horrors of life in the Warsaw ghetto, where the streets were strewn with shit.) A basic level of dignified organization was also a question of survival. In 1947, long before the Eichmann trial made the design of the “final solution” clear, an American sociologist named Marie Syrkin talked to dozens of survivors. They believed that the Nazis hoped intolerable living conditions in the ghettos would make the Jews “degenerate to the level of criminals. Those Jews who did not die [of starvation or disease] would rend each other like wild beasts. Perhaps the Nazis expected to be spared the necessity of bu
ilding special extermination centers. But the Jews did not die fast enough, nor did they degenerate as required.” That, in large measure, was the work of the Judenrats.

  Judenrat members were engaged in an intolerable but, they thought, essential negotiation with the Nazis, aimed at saving the greatest number of Jews in their ghettos. Some of them, like Bialystok’s Barasz, clearly aided the resistance, but as long as there remained, in their minds, a chance of saving at least some of the population, the Judenrats and the resisters worked at cross purposes. Put crudely, it was the difference between working on making life tolerable and working on making death beautiful. Chaika Grossman said as much in a speech she gave shortly after the war: “To live is not a difficult task. You must know … how to die.” To someone like my great-grandfather, this would have sounded like irresponsible drivel. Historian Raul Hilberg writes that Judenrat members “believed that their service was an obligation, and they were convinced with absolute certainty that they carried the entire burden of caring for the Jewish population.…The Jewish leaders were, in short, remarkably similar in their self-perception to rulers all over the world, but their role was not normal and for most of them neither was their fate.”

  The Judenrats tried to productivize the Jews, making them indispensable to the German war machine; the resisters sabotaged the work—Chaika Grossman describes, for example, that the Bialystok ghetto underground convinced workers to use a special glue in soldiers’ boots, causing them to fall apart after a month. From the point of view of historians who reduce the Jews’ struggle to the moment and manner of their death, the Judenrats failed miserably; the resisters failed gloriously. If the resisters died fighting and the Judenrat members died deluded and the rest of the Jews died somehow between these two extremes, then, surely, the Judenrats and the resistance shared no common ground. One of the most striking examples of this historical reductionism can be glimpsed in a footnote in Trunk’s book: in describing Barasz’s cooperation with the resistance, he is forced to cite the original manuscript of the diary of resistance leader Mordechai Tennenbaum-Tamaroff (who hid his journal in a safe place before the uprising, in which he was killed), because this passage was left out of the published version, presumably because it complicated the story too much.