I thanked him silently for his tears.
I made believe that Hannah, Stefa and Adam would welcome me beyond death.
Near the end, I heard a melody from out of my childhood, a folk song called ‘Hänschen Klein’ that my mother always sang in a mixture of Yiddish and German – and that I’d taught to Adam when he was tiny. Had I started to sing or had the man in front? I didn’t know. My senses were clouded by too great a wish for life.
When the hangman pulled the chair out from under my feet, I tried to hold my breath, but the taut heaviness of my own weight squeezed the air from me. Choking, I pulled at the ropes binding my hands, but the pressure drawing me down was too greedy.
And then the pain was gone. I found myself standing at the front of the crowd, next to the bent-backed man who had held me with his eyes. I watched my body swinging. And yet, looking down, I saw my own legs. I stepped my fingers across my cheeks and nose and lips, like a blind man reading a face.
I wasn’t who I’d been. And I was in two places at once. And no one could see me.
But I wasn’t scared. I felt as though all of the forward motion of the earth had ceased; that I’d stopped hurtling through my life.
But, of course, it was life that had stopped hurtling through me.
When I understood what had happened, I took a first step towards the front gate of the camp. And fell on my face. My nose and mouth pushed half a foot through the ground, into what felt like cold clay.
And yet when I picked myself up, I saw that I’d left no imprint in the earth.
Imagine a landscape continually sliding away from you – men and barracks slipping away into the distance, as though tugged by the horizon.
My first steps left me dizzy, lurching, groping along walls that weren’t there. I fell several more times, and on each occasion my hands penetrated several inches into the ground.
After an hour, I’d learned to focus only on objects close to me. What was in the distance I just let slip away. It took my feet and eyes a full two days to adjust to death. Then, I strode out of the camp.
While crossing Lublin, I looked up at a handsome woman leaning out her third-floor window, beating a sisal mat with a broom, and for a moment it seemed as if she could see me. My heart leapt towards hope, but then I realized she was glaring at a skinny white cat pawing some garbage behind me.
When I closed my eyes, each dry thud of the woman’s broom took form as a bluish square – one that quickly faded to pale green inside my inner darkness.
That was my first experience of a confusion of sight and sound, but later that day I’d notice that my heartbeat pulsed reddish-orange at the fringes of my vision, and that my breathing – particularly at night – appeared as a white-grey mist.
I headed out of town, northwest, towards Liza’s farm. Sometimes, I believed I could feel the turning of the earth below my feet. And when I grew tired, the cold December air began to shimmer around me, as though made from pearls. It was beautiful – and it made me understand that something of the world’s exuberance had remained far beyond the reach of the Nazis all the time I was in the ghetto and the labour camp.
I trudged on for two days and nights by my count. I often felt the urge to lie down, and on occasion I did, but I learned I no longer needed sleep.
I discovered Liza’s house empty and abandoned; Izzy was long gone.
On the floor by the potter’s wheel was the intricately designed skeleton of a dead mouse – the scaffolding of a life so perfect and unlike our own. Sitting by it, I began to think of Liza and of how quickly everything can be lost.
I realized I had to make the journey back to Warsaw, to where I’d started life.
Perhaps all the dead must go home before they can leave for ever.
CHAPTER 30
As I dictate these words to you, Heniek, I can see a group of twenty-seven Jews from the Łaskarzew ghetto digging a pit in a forest just outside town.
As I was walking back to Warsaw from the labour camp, I’d heard the clanging of their shovels and left the road. They’d already dug a couple of feet down into the hard earth when I reached them.
It was very early in the morning. Birds were arrowing through the trees, and once the fog burned off, we’d probably have a day of sun. Five Polish soldiers and one German SS commander stood outside the pit, their guns drawn.
After the Jews had excavated another foot of earth, the German ordered them to go down into the pit. The men, women and children helped one another. A few of them dared to whisper, though they’d been warned not to talk.
A father jumped in before his daughter and raised his arms to summon her forward.
She hesitated. ‘Where’s Rudy?’ she asked; perhaps he was her older brother, or maybe even the family dog.
‘Come here, Katarzyna,’ her father whispered.
She knelt down, reaching out to him, and he lifted her into his arms.
He kissed her on the cheek, then again on her lips. He never told her where Rudy was. Instead, he pressed her head gently into his chest so that she could no longer see the soldiers.
Katarzyna was the youngest among them. She looked seven or eight. She was calm, but twenty-six other hearts were racing, including her father’s. I knew that from the way they looked up at the soldiers.
The German’s order came as a surprise. As did the hail of bullets.
The Jews in the pit weren’t yet ready. And I wasn’t either. But whoever is?
The Polish soldiers used automatic rifles. Katarzyna’s father fell right away. The girl spilled out of his arms.
Several people screamed and kept screaming. But not for long.
Katarzyna’s father died immediately, as best I could tell.
The girl didn’t. I stood at the rim of the pit and looked down at her. One bullet had hit her in the shoulder, another in the leg.
For several more minutes she continued breathing, though her eyes were closed. She’ll bleed to death, I thought. But I was wrong.
By the time the Poles picked up their shovels all but two of the Jews were dead, though most of the twenty-seven bodies had become tangled and I can’t swear that they were the only ones left alive.
Besides Katarzyna, the only other person who showed signs of life was a young man with a shaved head and bright blue eyes, in his twenties I’d guess. He was groaning and trying to sit up.
The Polish soldiers shovelled soil on top of him and Katarzyna, and kept shovelling until I could see nothing more of either of them.
Why am I telling you a story you’d prefer not to hear, Heniek? Because one of the things it proves is an essential truth that you may not yet have understood: we can never return to the Before Time.
We must create a new calendar, one that begins in 1939, when we were walled inside.
It is now Year Two in our struggle to keep our shadows from vanishing.
I lost what I loved most, and with it, my second chance. Not unusual, of course; before this struggle is over, the best among us will have been killed, imprisoned or exiled. Those left alive will be the cowards and collaborators – the tiny, fearful men who worship darkness and call it the sun. They will live to a ripe old age. Their faces will pucker and their hair will fall out, and they won’t even remember their own birthdate, and yet they will recall the days when they fought for the Fatherland in fine-edged detail and with proud fondness, as if a rousing Wagner fanfare were always playing in the background. Because they were young and ruled the world for a few brief years.
They will tell their children and grandchildren – and anyone else who dares to ask – that they had no choice but to work for the Nazis, though they were never Party members…
Caligula will even tell little Martin and Angela – his beloved grandchildren – that he worked hard to save the Jews in his care.
And little Martin and Angela will believe him.
But you and I, Heniek, we know how it was. And our understanding means everything to me now, because it means I can stop telling
my story. And I can let you put down your pen.
We all want to be listened to – to feel we matter. We want to be able to tell the story of our life without being interrupted or judged, or asked to get to the point.
Freud and Chekhov, Jung and Dickens would all agree with me. I know it. And that is why they would understand why I’ve told you about my life the way I have.
‘The worst that can happen is that the Nazis will shoot us,’ Izzy once told me.
How many of us are able to live our lives knowing that there are far more terrible things than dying with a German bullet in your chest or a noose around your neck?
Those who can’t will always hate those of us who can. We know that now, you and I.
If you make it out of here, Heniek, then remember this: beware of men who see no mystery when they look in the mirror.
CHAPTER 31
‘What’ll you do now that we’ve finished your story?’ Heniek asked me.
We had spent the last two days editing the manuscript and were seated on his couch. He was putting a slice of boiled onion onto a wedge of black bread.
‘I’ll wait around Warsaw,’ I replied.
‘For what?’
‘For Adam and Stefa. I made it back home, so maybe they will too.’
‘Listen, Erik, don’t get your hopes up,’ Heniek told me. ‘If they haven’t come back by now…’
‘Still, where would I go? And I can’t bear the thought of Adam not finding me here if he makes it home. Though there is one thing you can do for me.’
Heniek grinned; he’d known this was coming since I first started dictating to him.
‘All right, what is it you want?’ he asked, amused – but also eager to help.
‘Go to my apartment across the street and get Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams from the bookshelves. It should still be there. Then bring it here.’
‘What if the apartment is locked?’ Heniek asked.
‘Get the building supervisor to open it for you. Tell him you need to return a book to the previous owner.’
Heniek returned a few minutes later with the book in his hand.
‘Open it,’ I told him, excited by the chance to help him.
‘What do we have here?’ Heniek asked with merry surprise on spotting Hannah’s ruby earrings.
He lifted them out and held one up to his ear. ‘What do you think?’ he questioned. He was grinning with delight.
‘I’ve seen worse,’ I told him dryly.
He sat down beside me again. ‘So what do you want me to do with them?’ he asked.
‘I want you to sell them and get money for bribes. I want you to leave the ghetto.’
He shook his head. ‘I don’t know if I-’
‘Listen,’ I interrupted harshly, ‘if you don’t make it out soon, then you won’t survive.’
‘So, our neighbourhood ibbur can see the future now?’ he asked, trying to use humour to mollify me.
‘Heniek, the kids that Lanik murdered… I no longer think that it’s mad to regard Adam’s death and the fate of all the Jews as linked. The Nazis want our children dead because they want to take our future away from us. I see that now – as clearly as I see you. So I don’t need a crystal ball to know that when the Germans run out of patience, everyone here will be packed into cattle cars and deposited at a labour camp – or marched out of town to dig their own graves in a nearby forest.’
‘But if I left, where would I go?’ he questioned.
‘I don’t know. But surely you’ve got an old friend or two on the outside.’
‘Maybe,’ Heniek said, but I could see he meant no.
‘Look, you think I’ve come for a reason. Maybe it’s to save you.’
‘But maybe not.’
‘If you need a better reason than your own life, then go and find Izzy and Liesel for me. Tell them how I died. Say that you were in the camp when I was hanged. Tell them I was ready to go. Kiss them for me and assure them that I met death with my hands in my pockets, that I wasn’t scared.*
* Erik asked me to put down my pen here, but we continued to converse for another minute at my kitchen table, and I include what we said to each other, this time, from my point of view:
‘But what you’ve just said isn’t true,’ I insisted. ‘You wanted to live. You told me so!’ I spoke desperately because I didn’t want him to send me away.
‘Yes, you’re right,’ Erik agreed. ‘Despite everything, I wanted a chance to go on. It was silly.’
‘Don’t you dare be ashamed of wanting to stay alive!’ I yelled.
Erik was quiet for a long time after that, but then, breathing deeply – as though summoning all his resolve – he reached slowly across to me and took my hand.
I could feel him – the roughness of his skin and warmth of his life. And it wasn’t painful.
Both of us were shocked. And reduced by gratitude to what was essential – two men acknowledging that nothing now could hold them apart. Not even their bodies.
I stood up and embraced him hard, and he hugged me back.
When we sat down again, Erik looked at me for a long time, and deeply, and I knew he was thinking that I understood him, and even more importantly, that I loved him, which was why, I think, he was able to stop telling me his story. And maybe it was why, too, I was able to leave the ghetto.
POSTSCRIPT
by Heniek Corben
I took Erik’s advice and fled our island.
His parting words to me were, ‘Say a kaddish for me if you ever make it to the labour camp where I died.’
‘But you don’t believe in God!’ I exclaimed.
‘True, but you do!’ he replied, flashing a mischievous smile. Then he fixed me with a grave look. ‘And one more thing, Heniek. After the Germans lose, they’ll want us to forget all that has happened. One person – just remember one! – and you will have foiled their plans.’
My last memory of Erik: he is standing on the rooftop of Stefa’s building, raising a hand to hail me and smiling. Was he aware that he had those bamboo arms he used to notice on all of us?
It was a blessing that he didn’t realize how far he’d fallen. And that he didn’t know that the stench of decay he often smelled was his own.
I thought he’d soon leave the roof and let me get on my way alone, but every time I turned, he was still waving to me.
Two weeks later, I reached a boyhood friend’s house in Vilnius, but it was too risky to go any further. I’ll call my friend Johann, though that’s not his real name; I wouldn’t want anyone to be able to identify his children or grandchildren, since they might one day suffer reprisals for his having hidden a Jew.
Johann owned a small grocery and lived alone in big old draughty house on the outskirts of town; his children were already grown and his wife was dead. I stayed for nearly two years with him. I never went outside. During the day, I mostly read novels and listened to the news on the radio. In the evenings, the two of us played backgammon, listened to symphonies on his Victrola and discussed how the war was going.
Johann buried Erik Cohen’s manuscript in his back garden, underneath a rosebush. I’d begun calling it The Warsaw Anagrams by then, because Erik had told me that that was his working title.
The Nazis discovered my hiding place on 7 October 1943, while Johann was at his grocery. They took me to a local prison. A week later, they sent me to the Stutthof labour camp.
Eighty-three pounds.
When the Soviets liberated the camp in late May 1945, that’s what I weighed. My arms weren’t bamboo; they were fishing rods!
Dysentery had turned me inside out by then and I was in the infirmary.
By the time I saw my first Soviet soldier, Stutthof was nearly empty, since the Germans had evacuated most of the internees weeks before, marching them towards more secure territory and leaving only the sick behind.
In a way, I came back from the dead, too – as a ghost haunting his own life.
I’ve always believed I survi
ved because of meeting Erik and taking down his story. It’s the only answer I have for why I am here and six million others are not. I’m aware that my explanation doesn’t make logical sense, but we all know by now that logic is not God’s strong point.
As soon as I had the strength, I made my way back to Johann’s house and dug up The Warsaw Anagrams. I learned from neighbours that he’d been executed the evening I’d been captured.
Lately, I’ve begun to cling to my memories of Johann when I begin to believe what the Nazis tried to prove to us all – that anyone can be made to betray those they love.
I moved back to Warsaw and opened a printing house again. Occasionally, I’d show The Warsaw Anagrams to the people I trusted, but Christian friends didn’t want to read about what the Nazis and their Polish helpers had done to their one-time neighbours, and the handful of Jews who’d returned were too fragile to revisit the past.
Erik and I wrote his story and it helps me pass my days easier knowing that we did it together. And I think the very act of reading is important – it means we have a chance to participate in a culture that the Nazis couldn’t kill.
Knowing you have done one good thing – no matter how small – is a comfort that no one can take away.
I like the tingling in my fingertips when I choose the type for the books I print. I like to have ink stains all over my hands. I like to invent words for the new language Erik wanted us to have.
Herzsterben – the death one feels in one’s chest on pushing away a starving beggar.
I try to live without expectations. I try to accept people as they are. I try to celebrate waking up every morning.
Zunfargangmeyvn – a connoisseur of sunsets; someone who has learned to savour what others take for granted.
And I try to live in a world where the most soft-spoken people win all the arguments.
Noc die Zweite.
The Warsaw Anagrams Page 29