The name of my dog. He’s a wiry dachshund who sleeps in my bed, his snout next to mine, and his snoring eases me into my dreams.
I try never to go to sleep without him. Too many memories await me if I enter the darkness alone.
Like almost everything else in the Warsaw ghetto, Stefa’s apartment house was blown up by the Nazis during the Ghetto Uprising of April 1943, then levelled by the Russians when they took control of the city. All those rutted old streets – and all we had suffered – were gone. Except inside our heads.
Some day, weeds and trees will have covered up all the rubble. And after that, when the developers have enough złoty, buildings will go up – even steel and glass hotels with fountains in the lobby. Tourists will spread their gaze over an urban landscape being born again, and they will whisper to their children, Hundreds of thousands of Jews were imprisoned here for years, but the kids will see only the maze of construction in front of their eyes and an army of helmet workers scurrying back and forth. They’ll ask if they can go swimming now in their hotel pool.
And why shouldn’t they?
Those who feel guiltiest will try to make us doubt the existence of all the bones that lie buried under the Polish topsoil and all the ash scattered through the Polish forests.
A walnut tree that was two feet high. Starting again like the rest of us.
An old man passing in the street spotted me staring at the spindly trunk and identified it. I’d thought it was a hazel. ‘No, it’s definitely a walnut,’ he told me, and he smiled at me as if it was a good omen.
I guess we’ll know if he’s right when we see the kind of nuts it gives us, five or ten years from now. Sometimes we need to wait a long time to know the meaning of what’s happening right at this very second.
I found the walnut tree growing out of the earthen pit where the courtyard of Stefa’s building had been.
I looked for Erik all over the city, but I never found him. How long must ibburs wander the earth? I’ve asked learned rabbis from Paris, Marseille and Istanbul, but none could tell me. ‘Their time may not be like ours,’ one of them explained to me, but I already knew that.
I like to think that Erik found Adam and Stefa, and during the easy days of summer, when the high, midday sun turns the rooftops to gold, I can almost convince myself that he must have. At night, however, when I’m listening to the rise and fall of Noc’s breathing, and beyond him to the loose web of silence that means that he and I are alone in a city that was once mine and no longer is, I trust only loneliness. I’m not much good at happy endings, just as Erik sensed.
While reading about the death camps a few years ago, I stumbled upon the identity of the official at Buchenwald to whom Rolf Lanik must have given his ‘gift’ of skin taken from Adam, Anna and Georg: Ilse Koch, wife of the commandant of the Buchenwald camp, Karl Otto Koch. In her trial for murder in 1951, German prosecutors revealed that she had made keepsakes – including lampshades – out of the skin of prisoners. Apparently, she was particularly fascinated by distinctive tattoos and often had men killed and their skin tanned so that she could display them in her home.
Lanik’s effort to win Ilse Koch’s gratitude does not seem to have won him the transfer to Buchenwald that he coveted, however; there is no record of his ever having served at that camp, which was overseen by Karl Otto Koch from July 1937 to September of 1941, when he and his notorious wife moved to the Majdanek camp.
Was it really Rabbi Kolmosin – the much-feared mystic Erik met in the Lipowa Street Labour Camp – who caused him to return as an ibbur? That is indeed what he led me to believe, though he was never sure. And yet I sometimes think that Erik may not have been entirely honest with me – that he may have had more to do with his unusual destiny than he was prepared to admit. After all, there were times when he seemed to let it slip that he was not the confirmed atheist he claimed, and that, at the very least, he knew about some traditional Jewish mystical practices. For instance, just after Stefa’s suicide, he chanted the names of everyone he’d ever loved until he lost his voice. Would a secular Jew really have made that effort? Additionally, Erik made it clear to me that he came to believe in the magical efficacy of names – a central tenet of kabbalah. After re-reading The Warsaw Anagrams on numerous occasions over the last few years, I have been forced to consider – though this remains just a speculation – whether Erik worked with Rabbi Kolmosin or some other unnamed sage in the labour camp in order to bring about his own return from the dead. As to why he wouldn’t have admitted this to me, there is a strong Jewish tradition that forbids such arcane and dangerous practices, and I suspect that he may have feared my judgement – or the judgement of any god he might have begun to believe in.
I mention this because I desperately want to do justice to Erik as the complex human being that I came to know, especially because it was he who gave me back a reason to live. But I must admit that the how of his reappearance among the living is no longer very important to me. Now that we know the full scope of the Nazi genocide – that the Germans almost succeeded in annihilating us – it’s only the why of his return that I still speculate about.
And, of course, I still wonder about the people whom he describes in The Warsaw Anagrams.
It was Dawid Engal, the superintendent of the building where Erik lived in the ghetto, who was able to tell me what happened to several of them. In the Before Time, he had been a professor of Polish literature at the University of Warsaw, and a colleague of his there was able to tell me that he emigrated to Brooklyn just after the war and found employment as a German teacher at Lafayette High School. We began corresponding during the summer of 1949.
Engal confirmed to me that Mikael Tengmann had indeed been killed shortly after Erik and Izzy’s escape from the ghetto. He told me that the physician’s body had been discarded one evening outside the front door of the Nozyk Synagogue. The rumour that Engal had heard was that bruises on Tengmann’s neck indicated that he had been strangled.
In response to my questions about Erik’s friends and neighbours, the professor added that the bakery in the courtyard where Ewa worked was shut down by the Nazis in July 1942. Shortly after that, Ziv purchased a pistol on the black market and joined the Jewish Combat Organization, telling everyone he would never permit the Germans to catch him alive. I have since discovered that, along with most of the members of that fighting force, he very likely died in the Ghetto Uprising, which began in January of 1943.
Ewa and Helena disappeared around the time the bakery was closed, and Professor Engal lost contact with them. In February 1952, however, the American Joint Distribution Committee was able to supply me with more information. Writing to me in Yiddish from New York, a researcher for that relief organization informed me that Ewa and Helena had been on the transport that left for Treblinka on 3 August 1942. They were gassed on arrival. My correspondent added that Rowy Klaus was transported to Treblinka several days later. From a camp survivor I later met while visiting Łódź, I learned that the young musician played violin in the camp orchestra that summer, but in the autumn he became ill with tuberculosis and was sent to the gas chamber.
Through my research, I have also learned that Zachariah Manberg – the little acrobat whom Erik hoped to save – managed to go into hiding with his mother and sister in Christian Warsaw in December 1942. Shortly after liberation, they moved to Canada. Zachariah is currently enrolled as a law student at the University of Toronto and we have established a correspondence.
I never learned whether Bina Minchenberg or Benjamin Schrei survived. They have vanished, like so many others.
Izzy was the person I most wanted to find out about, but I was unable to discover anything about his whereabouts – even if he had survived. Times were hard in Poland and it was impossible for me to travel to France to pursue my investigations. It took me years to accumulate enough savings and obtain the necessary papers from our Communist government. Finally, in the summer of 1953, I received authorization. Realizing that my wal
let was as full as it was ever likely to get, I packed a bag and left.
Unfortunately, I didn’t find his sons at the address in Boulogne-Billancourt that Erik had given me. By then, I had learned that Erik had made an anagram of Izzy’s surname, which was not Nowak but Kowan. I located two Kowan families in Paris, but they weren’t Polish Jews and they had no relatives who were watchmakers from Warsaw.
To protect his old friend, Erik must have lied to me about Boulogne-Billancourt. Izzy’s sons were probably living in some other Paris suburb or elsewhere in France. I wished I had asked him to give me Louis’ full name – and made him swear to me that it wasn’t an anagram.
Shortly after my hunt through Paris for Izzy, I was able to locate Irene’s mother, Sylvie Lanik, in Bordeaux. When we met, however, she refused to tell me anything about her daughter except to say that she was alive and well, and living in Switzerland. Irene bore some responsibility for her stepfather’s death, of course, and though more than a decade had passed since his murder, Mrs Lanik may have still feared her daughter’s arrest.
In August 1953, after my travels around France, I caught a boat to Cyprus and went on to Izmir by freighter. By then, I had learned that Erik’s wife Hannah had had Sephardic cousins named Zarco. I questioned three members of the family about Erik’s daughter Liesel, and I talked to about a dozen other Izmir Jews, but no one admitted knowing her. On one occasion, while speaking with her second cousin Abraham Zarco, I had the feeling that his denial wasn’t entirely genuine, but all my attempts to win his confidence proved useless. Maybe Liesel didn’t wish to be found. Or perhaps the family wanted nothing to do with her because of her relationship with Petrina.
My most recent find is Jaśmin Makinska. Only three months ago, I learned that she was living in England, where she had emigrated shortly after the war. To my great joy, I received a reply to my letter to her about a month ago. She told me that she was living near Weymouth, in a two-room cottage by the sea.
Jaśmin confirmed that she drove Erik and Izzy to Liza’s farm in March 1941, and that her sister was murdered by the SS when Erik was captured on 7 July.
Izzy fled on foot late that same afternoon, she told me. He managed to telephone her from a nearby town and give her the terrible news about Liza.
Jaśmin received one letter from Izzy, mailed three months later from Istanbul. He had made it there by freighter from Odessa, just as he and Erik had planned, and he would soon be on his way to Marseille. He was in excellent spirits and had already received a friendly letter from his old friend Louis, though he was full of remorse over Liza’s death and without much hope for Erik.
‘Izzy told me that he would write again when he was settled in the south of France, but I never received another word from him. The war had spread by then, and I suspect that his letters simply never made it to Warsaw. After I moved to England, he had no way of finding me – and there was no way I could locate him either.’
I expect that Izzy, his sons and Louis may be living in or around Marseille. I shall do my best to find them.
Jaśmin promises not to give up searching for him, as well, though she also says that she’ll never set foot in Continental Europe again.
*
On the way home from Izmir, I stopped in Lublin and said a kaddish for Erik outside the Lipowa Street camp. And for all the other heroic friends of ours who were long gone, especially Johann, who had given up his life for me.
Seeing the muddy clearing where Erik had been hanged and hearing my trembling voice undid me, however. I felt as if I were pulling my existence out of an emptiness so great that everything I saw and felt was only an illusion.
I stayed just long enough to intone an ‘El Male Rachamim’ for Erik’s soul and then fled, though turning away from where he’d been murdered made me feel as though I was leaving behind the best part of myself.
I think of Erik every day of my life. I try to remember the dead in all their uniqueness, as he would have wanted.
The autobiography of the Jews is still being written. That is our victory. And I believe now that Erik’s deepest hope was for The Warsaw Anagrams to serve as his contribution to it. I am convinced, in fact, that that was why he returned as an ibbur.
Heniek Corben
Warsaw, 3 Kislev, 5715 (28 November 1954)
GLOSSARY
(all words are in Yiddish except where otherwise indicated)
Alter kacker – Literally, ‘old shitter’, but with the meaning of ‘old fart’.
Brenen zol er! – ‘May he burn in hell’; a common curse.
Challah – A yeast-leavened egg bread, usually braided, traditionally eaten on the Sabbath.
Der shoyte ben pikholtz – ‘The idiot son of a woodpecker’; a traditional epithet.
Dreidl – a four-sided top inscribed with the Hebrew letters and, which together form the acronym for (a great miracle happened there).
Ech – A groan or exclamation of displeasure or disparagement.
‘El Male Rachamim’ – Hebrew prayer for the repose of the soul of the departed.
Festina lente – Latin for ‘hurry slowly’.
Flor – German word for the gauze or crepe used in women’s clothing and in veils.
Gehenna – Hebrew word for hell, used commonly in Jewish folktales and kabbalistic literature.
– Polish for stuffed cabbage leaves; part of the country’s traditional cuisine.
Golem – Hebrew: In Jewish folklore and mystical traditions, a golem is an animated being created entirely from inanimate matter. The most famous story of such a creature involves Rabbi Judah Loew of Prague, who was said to have created a golem to defend the Jewish ghetto from anti-Semitic attacks.
Gottenyu – My God!
Goy – Non-Jewish person, gentile.
Goyim – The plural of Goy.
Hak mir nisht ken tshaynik! – Literally, ‘Don’t knock me a teakettle,’ but with the meaning, ‘Stop rattling on and on with that endless chatter!’
Hänschen klein – Little Hans in German.
Hatikvah – An anthem written by Naphtali Herz Imber, a Galician Jew, who moved to Palestine in the 1880s. The Hebrew title means ‘The Hope’.
Hilfe – ‘Help’ in German.
Ibbur – Hebrew word for ghost, spirit or spectre.
Kaddish – The Jewish prayer of mourning.
Katshkele – Little duck.
Levone – Moon.
Linka – ‘String’ in Polish.
Macher – Important person or big shot.
Mazel tov – Of Hebrew origin, an expression that means ‘I’m thrilled for your good fortune’, ‘Good for you’ or simply ‘Congratulations!’
Meshugene – Crazy.
Meiskeit – Very ugly person, sometimes used with affection, as when applied to a child so ugly only its mother could love it.
Mitzvah – Hebrew word for commandment. It generally refers any one to the 613 duties of each and every Jew, as enumerated in the Torah. By extension, any good deed.
Noc – ‘Night’ in Polish.
Noc die Zweite – Night the Second (as the name of a dog in the text).
Payot – The sidelocks of hair (often ringlets by the temple) worn by Hasidic Jews and others.
Petzl – pee-pee, as in a young boy’s penis. From putz, a vulgar term for penis.
Piskorz – ‘Small fish’ or ‘minnow’ in Polish.
Reb Yid – A traditional and polite form of address.
Schmaltz – Chicken fat used in cooking.
Schul – School and, by extension, synagogue services.
Sheygets – An elongated pastry stuffed with poppy seeds and glazed with honey. From its resemblance to the uncircumcised member of a sheygets – a gentile boy.
Sheyn Vi Di Levone – ‘Beautiful is the Moon’ (the name of a Yiddish lullaby).
Shiva – The week of mourning for the dead prescribed by Jewish law.
Shmekele – Little penis.
Shtetl – A small Jewish town or village.
Sitra Ahra – The Other Side (from the Aramaic term used in kabbalistic literature to designate the demonic sphere or domain of evil).
Tsibele – Onion.
Tzitzit – Hebrew word for the tassels or fringes at the corners of a prayer shawl. They are to remind us of the commandments of Deuteronomy 22:12 and Numbers 15:37-41.
Ver mir di kapore – Literally, ‘become my sacrificial hen’ and by extension, ‘drop dead!’ An expression taken from the religious practice in which a sacrificial chicken (kapore-hun) is waved around the head of a Jew on the eve of Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement) and then slaughtered as a ‘scapegoat’ for the sins of the chicken’s owner.
Źydóweczka – Little Jew-girl in Polish.
About the Author
Richard Zimler was born in New York. After gaining degrees from Duke University and Stanford University, he worked as a journalist in San Francisco for nearly a decade. He is the author of seven other novels, including The Search for Sana, The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon and The Seventh Gate. He has won many prizes for his writing and has lectured on Sephardic Jewish culture all over the world. He lives in Porto, Portugal.
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