‘Erik, no!’ he whispered desperately as I stepped away.
I meant to say with my eyes that our time was over, and I meant my smile to mean that I had no other choice. Did he understand?
When the cellar door opened, I started up the stairs with my hands extended high over my head.
‘I’m coming up!’ I called out in German. I didn’t dare glance at Izzy, because I was sure that his darkly shadowed eyes – and everything in them that I wanted to live for – might steal my courage, though I wished I could have reassured him that I’d be all right.
Three SS officers had come to the farm. Though I put up no resistance, the two younger ones knocked me down and kicked me. Liza stood by, shouting curses at them, until the one in command – forty-ish, with greying hair around his temples and black eyebrows – grabbed her and threw her to the ground.
‘I didn’t tell them!’ she shouted to me as I was dragged away. ‘I swear!’
The Germans shoved me into the back seat of their car.
Before I was able to holler out the window that I knew she could never betray us, the older Nazi raised his gun and fired. Liza fell over with a guttural cry, clutching her arm.
I shoved open my door and got out. ‘Stop!’ I shouted at him. ‘She only hid me to make money!’
He never even turned to me. He put the barrel of the gun up to Liza’s ear.
She showed him a bewildered look.
I can still hear the explosion of the bullet; it’s the sound of all the best people I ever knew being murdered.
The German in command got in the back seat beside me, demanding to know my name and where I was from. He slapped me across the face when I made no reply. Struggling for breath, I told him my name was Izydor Nowak and that I was a clockmaker from Warsaw; I appropriated my old friend’s identity because he’d be able to disappear more completely if the Nazis believed that they had captured him already.
I also told him that he had murdered a wonderful woman who had not deserved to die.
I next remember entering Puławy, where my captors made me stand in a town square with a group of about fifty other Jewish men for the rest of that day and all through the night. The Christian residents – thousands of them, it seemed to me – passed us on their way home from work, but none of them offered us a crust of bread or a cup of water. The Germans wanted to prove to us, I think, that we were nothing – less important to our Polish neighbours than dogshit on the sidewalk. And it was true.
By the time morning came, I was unable to escape my misery even for a moment. My throat felt as though it had been blasted with sand, and I was having trouble breathing. I had no more tears left.
Polish and German soldiers soon marched us off. To where, we had no idea. My good fortune was that exhaustion and dehydration made me delirious. Puławy was substituted by Warsaw, and I was rushing down Leszno Street. The dome of the Great Synagogue was rising into a sunlit sky just ahead, imposing, but like a grandfather only pretending to be stern, and summer rain had begun to fall, and its hammering against the dome was a good sound, the sound of life being born…
I stayed in Warsaw until a gunshot tugged me back to myself. A man in front of me had collapsed and been executed. Flies were already feeding at the wound in his head. We were walking down the platform of a small train station.
‘Keep going!’ someone yelled at me in German.
Stepping over the man, I knew that our blood would never be completely erased from the streets of every Polish city and town – not even if it rained every day for a thousand years. And I was thinking: The Poles who survive this war will hate us for ever, because the bloodstained cobblestones of their cities and towns will remind them of their guilt.
On the train, inside an oven-hot cattle car, I dropped down and curled into a ball to keep from being crushed. I wanted water so badly that I’d have opened a vein had I carried anything sharp on me.
I must have passed out. When I awoke, soldiers were jabbing us with their rifle butts, their Alsatians straining for a chance to taste Jewish flesh. They marched us forward. My head was heavy and cumbersome, as though it might fall off from its own weight, and my dry, useless tongue was a dead lizard inside my mouth.
We arrived at a large camp of wooden barracks and were marched through the front gate up to a desk where two prisoners were ladling water into tin cups. The liquid tasted of metal, but I gulped it down as fast as I could. I didn’t have enough saliva yet to eat, or even an appetite, but I grabbed my crust of bread as if it were Hannah’s hand.
I slept that night on a wooden floor surrounded by other recent arrivals.
The next morning, after roll call, one of the head prisoners called out Izzy’s name, and when I answered, he led me into a barracks that had become a workshop for tailors and escorted me to the back, where three skeletal men were seated tightly together, hunched over a table piled with hundreds of watches. ‘Enjoy your new office,’ he told me, and just like that he walked away.
A tall, anxious-eyed young man with a shaved head stood up and shook my hand. I told him my legs were still unsteady and asked if I could sit.
‘Of course,’ he replied, standing aside and gesturing towards his chair.
He told me his name was Chaim Peczerski. He introduced me to his two co-workers, Jan Głowacz and Jakub Weinberg.
Jakub had a torn ear and spectacles missing a lens. I thought that maybe one of the Alsatians had attacked him. Later, when I got to know what he was capable of, I asked some other prisoners, and I was told he’d started a vicious fight with a tailor from Turobin who’d bitten him to keep from being strangled to death.
Chaim explained that the watches on their desks had been stolen from Jews, as well as from Polish and Russian prisoners of war. We were in a labour camp run by the SS.
I was so disoriented I asked him if we were anywhere near Lublin.
‘You’re in Lublin, you idiot!’ Chaim replied, laughing.
‘You’re a Hebrew slave working for Pharaoh now,’ Jan added, sticking a homemade cigarette in his lips and grinning.
He had a waxy, sweaty face that I found frightening – as if it were a mask.
‘You’ll work with me,’ said Jakub, and his tiny brown eyes darted falcon-like from my face to my hands and then my feet, as if he was on a stimulant. Only a week later did I realize why.
‘We’ve a lot of work,’ Chaim told me. ‘We have a quota to meet each day or we don’t get any bread.’
‘The problem is, I know nothing about fixing watches,’ I confessed. ‘I lied to the Germans.’
‘You what?’ Jakub demanded indignantly.
‘I lied.’
‘You old bastard!’ he spat out, and he looked over at Chaim as though to demand my execution. The youngest among us was apparently in charge.
‘I had to protect a friend,’ I explained.
‘That’s fine, but you’re not working with me!’ Jakub snarled.
I stood up to go, but Chaim pushed me back down roughly. ‘What do you really do?’ he asked.
‘I’m a failed novelist,’ I replied, since it seemed safer to keep pretending I was someone other than myself.
Jakub laughed at the absurdity, and Jan sneered, ‘You’re useless!’
‘Get up!’ Chaim ordered. He pointed to the door. ‘Wait outside while we talk.’
When he called me back in, he told me that Jakub and Jan had voted against letting me work with them, but that he had overruled them.
‘You’ve got three days to learn enough to hold your own,’ he told me in a voice of warning.
I worked hard, but after three days I was still pretty much useless with the tiny screwdrivers and pliers. Chaim came up with a solution, however; I would polish all the watches that he and his colleagues fixed, thereby doing a quarter of our total work. Jan found that acceptable, but Jakub cursed me. He also began referring to me as Dostoevsky’s Jewish Idiot, which he regarded as witty.
One night, about a week later, I awakened
to find Jakub leaning over me, whispering Hebrew words I didn’t understand. When I tried to sit up, he pushed me back down. Then he tugged my shoes off my feet.
‘What’ll I wear?’ I asked, moaning.
‘That’s your problem!’
As he crawled back in his bunk, I realized that when we’d first met, he’d studied me for what I had that might be worth stealing.
The camp had an active black market, and in exchange for five days’ worth of the rancid broth that passed for our soup, I was soon able to obtain flimsy leather shoes – three sizes too big – that I stuffed with newspaper.
Jakub then started taking my bread right out of my hands, mocking me when I refused to fight him for it and only stopping when a bigger prisoner put a homemade knife to his neck.
Jakub wanted to punish me as much as he wanted life. Maybe they were even the same thing for him.
Sometimes I think he uttered a magical curse over me on the night he stole my shoes, or on another occasion when I didn’t wake up in time to know he was with me, and that’s why I’m still here.
Before the ghetto, I’d have thought that was impossible, Heniek, but listen…
Jakub’s brother-in-law was a rabbi from Chelm named Kolmosin – a sturdy little red-nosed man, maybe fifty years old. He and Jakub used to pray together on Friday evenings behind a burlap curtain they hung over their adjoining bunks. The rumour I heard was that the rabbi was a descendant of Shabbetai Tzvi, and that he knew powerful incantations that had been passed down from branch to branch in their family tree for twenty generations – incantations that governed life and death. He had bribed the guards to be able to keep a Torah the size of a deck of cards with him, and we often caught glimpses of him huddled over it, making rapid annotations with a tiny pencil. Chaim told me that if he wrote down your name, your destiny would change, and it would be good or bad depending on the nature of the verse in which he had inserted it. In consequence, prisoners would try to win Kolmosin’s good graces by polishing his shoes or darning his socks, or by giving him smuggled cigarettes, sugar or other small gifts. He was the only prisoner I ever saw in a clean white shirt. He lived like a pasha.
Once, in August, I saw the would-be holy man sitting naked on his red velvet cushion and singing to himself. He carried that ridiculous velvet cushion with him everywhere because of his haemorrhoids – which were apparently beyond the control of his magical annotations. Later, he taught the oriental-sounding tune to Jakub and some of the other prisoners. He claimed that he’d learned it in a vision and that it would keep us safe.
I was of the opinion that singing ‘Deutschland, Deutschland über alles’ would produce better results, but maybe Kolmosin had the last laugh; the more I think about it, the more I wonder if he might not have helped Jakub tether me to the earth by writing me into a verse of Torah that would make me return after death. Perhaps I represented an opportunity for him as well, but for what I cannot guess.
Grudgingly, I have to admit that I have come to believe in magic, though I remain an atheist. A paradox? Probably, but what could be more common than that?
On waking and going to sleep, I’d picture Liesel sitting with Petrina on a beach near Izmir. I wrote long letters to her in my head, and while I was polishing watches, I’d often daydream about her, though my favourite fantasy was of Izzy surprising Louis – appearing at his door one day, unannounced. In my mind, the two men embraced for a long time, and then went for an arm-in-arm promenade along the Seine. Sometimes I joined them for tea and cake at Les Deux Magots.
I lived inside my head. For hours at a time, I’d walk through the Warsaw of my childhood and the London of my honeymoon, and the tours I took by myself – and sometimes with Hannah – kept a small pale flame alive inside me.
Come September, I was nearly always freezing, and often sapped of strength by a cold or diarrhoea. My body had become a cumbersome nuisance, and – like most of the men – I longed to be able to discard it.
*
There were a thousand of us in the camp – a thousand moths caught in a black and red lamp, fluttering against the glass of our Jewish identities.
But one of us found a way out, and his escape soon became mine as well.
On the morning of 7 December, our German guards noticed that a prisoner from Lublin named Maurice Pilch was missing. He had been a tannery worker. It was later discovered that he had concealed himself inside a shipment of hide bound for Austria. In effect, he’d mailed himself to Graz for Hanukkah!
The camp inmates were cheered by Maurice’s witty escape, but only briefly; the commandant, Wolfgang Mohwinkel, decided to execute ten men to compensate for Pilch’s effrontery.
An hour or so after this news spread through the camp, Chaim, Jan, Jakub and I heard screaming outside the barracks where we worked and rushed outside. Two guards had caught a teenaged prisoner and pinned him to the ground. One of them had his right knee pressing hard into the young man’s chest. We called this particular guard Caligula, because he enjoyed murder and was good at it. So far, he’d shot seven men for sport as they sat on the latrine.
Caligula told us gleefully that the boy was one of the ten Jews to be hanged. ‘The commandant likes ’em young!’ he gloated, as though he were talking about rape.
The trapped teenager had freckles and stiff blond hair like a brush. Chaim knew his name – Albert – and that he worked in the printing shop with his father. They were from Radom.
Caligula soon took away his knee and pressed his club over Albert’s neck so that he’d stop screaming.
I learned that day that a boy will punch and kick like a demon to see his seventeenth birthday, even if his windpipe is being crushed and he is unable to draw any breath.
‘He looks like a beetle on his back,’ Jakub whispered in a sneering tone.
After what seemed an excruciatingly long struggle, though it may have been only half a minute, Albert stopped gagging and flailing. His arms relaxed and his head sagged to the side. His eyes closed.
I thought he was dead, but the guard knew differently. Sensing a good time to be had, he eased off on the boy’s neck. After a second or two, Albert’s eyes fluttered open and he gulped for breath. He tried to sit up, but Caligula pushed him back down.
The Nazi brute called me over. ‘Stand on the ends of my club!’ he ordered.
Albert’s brown eyes shifted urgently to me, pleading for mercy. He tried to speak, but the German pressed down harder.
The weight of even my flimsy body would have broken the young man’s neck, so I shook my head.
‘Stand on the club or I’ll shoot him!’ Caligula yelled at me.
‘I can’t,’ I replied, though I knew he would carry out his threat.
‘Do it, you Jewish pig!’ he shouted.
‘Take me instead,’ I told him; it was all I could think of saying that would end this stalemate, though I admit I wanted to retract my offer a moment later.
But Caligula didn’t give me time for that.
‘You? Why should we waste our time killing an old man like you?’ he demanded contemptuously.
I felt cornered, and all I had with me was the truth. ‘Because I’m more dangerous to you than the boy,’ I replied.
‘And why is that?’ he asked, amused.
‘Because he’s young and may forget you if he goes on to lead a happy life, but I won’t. I’ll write about what you did to us and then dance on your grave.’
The malevolent guard smiled at me and lifted his club from Albert’s neck, as if my courage to speak my mind had purchased both of us our lives, but by now I was aware that the Nazis adored playing a game called Fool the Jew. I sensed the worst and raised my hand for mercy. And to cut a deal. ‘If you let us both live, I’ll tell you where to find some ruby earrings that I’ve…’
Rearing back with his club, Caligula ended my plea by giving Albert so brutal a blow to his head that the crack of his skull sounded like a branch being snapped.
The young man groaned. His head
sagged, and his arms went limp.
The German kept hitting Albert until blood was flowing down his face on to the ground.
When he was done, he stood over the boy like a prizefighter posing for cameras. It was his theatricality that made me realize how vain our Nazi guards were, all of them eager to be stars in their very own Leni Riefenstahl film.
When the flashbulbs in his head stopped going off, he pointed his club at me. ‘You!’ he snarled. ‘You’re number ten now!’
The body has a life of its own; when the noose was placed around my neck, the constriction that had gripped my gut for the last few days burst open. Several hundred men were watching, but none laughed at the moist sag I’d made in the seat of my rumpled trousers. I wished I could have recited a verse of poetry equal to all the damned and shipwrecked faces around me, but my mind was dim, as if a sack had been placed over my thoughts, which were all jumbled together.
I remember looking for Izzy, thinking that seeing his face would help me to leave this world. When I recalled that he wasn’t with me any longer, my heart dived towards a panic so wide and deep that I felt as if I would never hit bottom.
I wanted one of Kolmosin’s incantations now – one that would make me land on the solid ground I’d known at Liza’s farm, even if it meant my back would be broken.
And I wanted a phrase of wisdom that would sum up what I’d learned over the course of my life.
I wanted more time. And more words.
I spotted Jakub. Hate is eternal, he was telling me with his ugly frown.
That was when I realized he’d needed a mortal enemy to keep himself alive.
A man in front – I’ll never know his name – diverted my attention with a small wave. He was bent and twisted, like a bonsai plant. He was crying.
His tortured form had made him understand what I couldn’t say. I was sure of it.
He held me through his jade-coloured eyes, and he assured me with all he was that I didn’t need to find any wisdom. All I had ever done and thought added up to Erik Cohen and that was enough.
The Warsaw Anagrams Page 28