Men of Snow

by John R Burns

  It had been expected. They had all understood, but could still pray that it might not happen.

  ‘My God, my God,’ he heard another voice muttering.

  ‘Don’t move, don’t move or they’ll see us,’ demanded another.

  ‘It doesn’t matter what happens, Jews will stick together. That’s what they do. That’s what they have always done. They have been conditioned to support each other.’

  For an instant he could see his house. For a sickening moment he saw in his imagination all the rooms, his father and mother, his own bedroom, his sister’s desk, the kitchen with its windows wide open to let in the summer air, the new family cat curled on the front room window sill, all of it suddenly blasted into a black explosion of tiny pieces flying above the roofs of the town, up into the clear blue sky, drifting then towards the forest. And the same for Polyna who was walking down her street as the sound of the bomb screamed towards her and she too was shattered into the pieces of all his memory held of her.

  He forced himself to move as he started crying and his legs were trembling and he felt sick in the heat and anguish. The sensation was of grey steel thrust through his mind, of its metallic taste, of the deadly sheen off its surface like ingredients of a new dread.

  ‘The enemy is waiting. It is stronger than we are. How can you resist something like that?’

  Words rattled like new bullets.

  The wide open sky of the flatlands bounced sound from one side to the other as though every action across huge distances was connected.

  Slowly he crawled further along the ditch, past others who were hiding there. The two bridges across the river had already been destroyed. The one built of stone had its middle section missing. The one of iron had been hit in several places with girders stuck out at different angles. People were trying to balance along one of the girders in an attempt to escape only for the sounds of a machine gun followed by several figures dropping into the brown, slow moving water.

  ‘You’ll never do it in a million years,’ Benjamin had once challenged him.

  Neither of them had ever swum the river.

  He tied his boots together and hung them round his neck before crawling over some rocks and into the river. Others were coming from the other side, splashing and gasping. A woman was trying to hold a young child’s head out of the water as she thrashed her legs fighting against the water’s flow.

  ‘In the Jewish spirit there is so much strength. The cultural soul of Europe depends on our existence. We are its sustenance. Our faith is in the word. Our race depends on the word.’

  The water was warm and sluggish. A bloated body floated past, a man’s shirt stretched over a head to leave only a mess of dark hair. Smoke full of pine drifted over from the forest fires. More planes came low overhead as there was another rattle of a machine gun and explosions from the town.

  ‘Nothing is greater than the word. The word is made flesh, the spirit of our people. We exhort through the word until it creates all understanding,’ he could hear one of his teachers saying again.

  He pushed with his arms, moving his legs up and down as his stomach tightened with fear.

  He thought of Uncle David and worried where he was.

  ‘Your family do not go to the synagogue or celebrate any of our festivals because your father is a member of the Bund, or that’s the excuse he gives,’ Uncle had once explained, ‘He believes only in the Jewish race and that it should be organised on a socialist basis, or so he says.’

  Pieces of a horse cart were turning slowly round and past him in the dark water. Another corpse floated by as smoke came down over the river blocking out everything.

  In his mind was another teacher speaking as he struggled to reach the other side.

  ‘The Jew knows the significance of life. We believe in human advancement. The word is from one to the other so it can make us as one. We, wherever we live, are our own country.’

  The memories of what his teacher had said were part of the despair. The dream was everywhere and he was its soundless centre until the sound of bullets whined through the thick smoke and somebody was screaming.

  He could hear again other people trying to swim in the other direction away from the town until their efforts were lifted into the sky from a huge detonation that seemed to suck up the river and everything in it.

  Finally his hands hit the bottom and he dragged himself out onto the embankment and crouched beneath a muddy ledge where birds and water rats usually nested.

  ‘The swifts lay the eggs and the rat eats them, simple really.’

  Benjamin was talking as suddenly people were jumping over where he was crouched, plunging into the river, all in a rush of shouts, some trying to hold onto their bags, one holding a suitcase as a float in front of him. Smoke swirled around them until they disappeared and Leon was shivering, clawing into the mud, pushing hard against the river bank.

  ‘You’re just scared of everything,’ Hella had once said, ‘you’re scared of yourself. No wonder.’

  He could not move. Inside his sodden trousers he felt the warm urine dribbling down. Around him everything was smoke and sound.

  Finally he pulled himself up to see over the edge of the river’s embankment. Through the waves of black smoke he could see the end of Dinovski Street. Yesterday from here it would have taken ten minutes to walk to his house. Now he felt it might take forever if there was anything left.

  ‘You have to cherish the time you’ve got, know what I mean?’ asked Uncle David, ‘Like I do and then you’ll have no regrets because you’ll have done as much as you can.’

  Polyna’s face, her wide lips, her dark eyelashes were there for an instant. It was a face he had drawn so often, loving it in a way he had never done before.

  Some of the houses along Dinovski Street were burning fiercely. He knew he had to try, but had no idea what that meant.

  ‘What would you do?’ Benjamin had asked him, ‘If you could stay in this moment forever and not die? If you had the choice, what would you do? Die or stay just here, like this, stuck in time, never growing older, never doing anything except being here in this moment?’

  Two bodies were laid out on the cobbles at the beginning of the street, one over the other, arms extended, blood already drying around them.

  ‘I just want you to go to Cousin Joseph’s in Lintov. It will mean you staying overnight. Ruth has pickled some vegetables and said she wanted us to have some. She is always so generous. I know this is not a good time but we need all the food we can get,’ mother had said, which meant he had been on his way back when the attack had started. His rucksack full of pickled tomatoes and beetroot had been thrown away when he had approached the river and now the words drilled through his head like a sudden torture, his mother asking again, such a simple request, one he had done many times before, out along the road to Lintov under an open sky knowing that the next evening he was hoping to catch a glimpse of Polyna on her way to the bakery.

  In a crouched run he crossed to the first house and stopped in its doorway at the sight of the first Germans. They were the perfect image, the childhood propaganda, helmets and rifles and leaning slightly forward, three of them crossing the other end of the street, blackened faces, shoulders tight. In a second his imagination had them turn towards him to have three bullets pierce his skin, his muscles, his heart and out the other side to scream on over the river into the smoke smeared sky.

  ‘All are equal. There should be no master and slave, no capitalist and worker, no rich and poor, no miserable struggle compared to a life of ease, no subservience to those who rule,’ had been his father’s constant mantra.

  In the air were more thuds, more planes and sound of wood crackling and gunshots, people shouting as he somehow managed to keep going down the cobbled street now the enemy was unseen, only heard as his mind trembled towards his mother, father, sister, Polyna and uncle David and the dread increased with every footstep, his body scraping against the front of the houses in Divonski Stre
et where Polish workers lived.

  ‘Sometimes I think it’s fate. We pretend to make decisions when it’s all set out in front of us like a tunnel. Life’s a tunnel,’ uncle David had laughed, ‘so look out for the train coming in the other direction.’

  Without thought he crashed open the side door of the last building that was on the corner of the town’s smaller square.

  ‘We have to fight,’ Benjamin had stated, ‘Even though the Poles think we’re shit we have to try. Come with me Leon. We can go together. Join up. Be in uniform. We might be the only Jews in the whole Polish army, heroes of course. Yes!’ Benjamin had called out, ‘Come on Leon. What do you say?’

  He closed the door behind him, standing in the shuttered shadows of what he realised must be the store room of the grocer’s shop that fronted onto the square. The smell was of herbs and rotting vegetables. There were sacks piled in one corner around which a swarm of flies flittered through the dimness.

  ‘We’re not leaving. Why should we leave? This is our home. This is our town. We’re not leaving. Others might think of Palestine or anywhere else, but this is where we live. We have as much right as anybody else to be here. If we go we will be defeated. We will be running away again. It has happened too many times. No,’ his father had said, ‘No.’

  Momentarily was the contrast with this small, shadowed room and the noise outside. When he found the wooden steps leading up to the next level there was the sound of trucks coming into the square.

  A pistol was jabbed into the side of his head as he reached the top of the steps.

  ‘Don’t make a sound. Not a thing, not a sound,’ came the hissed instructions.

  In Leon everything stopped, even the fear.

  ‘Move into the room. Move now.’

  With a glance to the side he saw a man who he had once seen drinking in Uncle David’s inn.

  There were two women and two other men crouched up near where the room’s only window was covered in torn sacking.

  ‘If you make a sound I’ll shoot you because if you make a sound we’ll all be done for.’

  There was so much noise from outside Leon could hardly hear what he was saying.

  ‘He’s a Jew,’ one of the women muttered.

  ‘An unlucky Yid,’ the man crouched beside her tried to whisper.

  ‘So come and see,’ the one with the gun said as he motioned for him to go to the window.

  The group shifted to the side as the dread felt sickly and his head began to shift in strange circles. He had no sense of who he was.

  ‘He’s a Jew,’ the woman had said. Maybe that’s all the definition that was necessary.

  But Leon could smell the sun warmed sacking. His glimpse took a few seconds.

  Immediately there were so many things happening.

  He centred on the German officer first with the red scars. He was standing at one side of the square and seemed to be in control. The square was his. The action was from his commands. Leon focused hard, the tanned face under the helmet lid, the livid squeezed skin down his cheek and part of his neck, the way he was standing, posed and rigid, arms held stiffly down, boots covered in dust, trousers still partly creased. In an instant there was the obvious authority. Leon realised the power this man had as he watched him through the tear in the sacking.

  ‘They rounded up all the Jews they found,’ the woman next to him started in fast words as he carried on looking.

  The square had smoke drifting from some of the shops burning on the further side. There were three trucks parked up in front of the town’s restaurant.

  ‘It was one of the first things they did,’ the woman continued.

  Some of the soldiers were in line a few yards away from their officer.

  ‘And they knew where to go to find them. It’s as if they’d lived all their lives here. The officer gave them directions. He’s the one. You can tell. He’s in charge here. This is his town. It’ll be us next, but not us first. It’s as if they could smell where to go, like dogs on the prowl. You’re a Jew. You can understand. It’s as if that’s what they came for. They’ve killed some of us so they can kill all you lot. Anyone gets in the way. I would have rounded the lot up if I thought that would have stopped what they’ve done to the town. We should have just gone out and said to them straightaway that we’d do the job for them. That would have saved those Poles who they’ve shot already.’

  There were several bodies laid in the square in different positions with pools of blood around them.

  Then there was Polyna. She was naked and stretched out.

  A man was on his knees near the old well before a soldier fired one shot from his pistol into the back of the man’s head before he fell to the side.

  ‘Does no good,’ came the voice of the woman beside him, ‘trying to pretend. They know her father and brothers. They wanted to know from her where they’d gone. And she told them nothing.’

  Polyna’s wrists and ankles were tied to the legs of what looked like a butcher’s slab so her thighs were stretched out and blood was still dribbling from between them.

  ‘It was the officer. It’s him. He ordered one of them to shove a bayonet up her and waited just a bit to see if any of the others would talk.’

  The others were on their knees, hands on heads, men of the town, around twenty of them with soldiers standing behind as more smoke trailed across the square and with it the smell from the burning shops.

  He looked for a moment at Polyna’s white, lifeless body and then at the officer, absorbing all he could of the man’s features.

  Leon turned then and was sick from his Cousin Ruth’s breakfast, his vomit splattering over the bare boards.

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  They waited for the darkness that came after midnight.

  Leon followed the group down the wooden steps, followed them along alleyways and across gardens and fields until they reached the start of the trees. He thought of the man with the axe, of the way it had taken him twice to sever the head from the man’s body.

  When they finally stopped he lay down and went to sleep.

  The next day they walked deeper into the forest, memories still haunting him.

  Automatically he followed these strangers.

  Again when they stopped for the night he lay on the soft earth between the trees.

  When he awoke the group of Poles was larger. They were crouched together talking in low voices.

  He did not recognise any of the new ones. Again without thinking he went after them when they decided to move, in line, between the tall pines, trudging on all day with hunger beginning to take over, the tight emptiness stretching, demanding like thousands of tiny hands turning and twisting, begging to be given something, anything.

  This time when they stopped he curled up on a bed of pine needles as though to protect his stomach from the hunger. He could not sleep because of the pain. All he could do was squeeze his legs up tighter. For a few minutes he would lose consciousness and then be awoken by the need to fill his stomach, a throbbing inside him, something he had never experienced before until he was remembering over and over cousin Ruth cutting the bread into thick slices, spreading a light smear of butter and then pouring out the strong tea. That’s all he wanted, continuously wanted, continuously remembered.

  ‘Eat all of it,’ she had said, ‘Eat all of it,’ he heard again, ‘Eat all of it.’

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  ‘These are the clever ones,’ Uncle David often said, ‘Everybody goes on about artists and scientists but it’s rubbish. It’s these people who are the real creative ones. They hold the wonders of being practical. You can’t beat it. What you see are men of high skill solving problems by the minute. They’re brilliant and yet I pay them hardly anything.

  His uncle’s workshop made everything needed in the town, furniture, window frames, barn doors, fencing, roof beams, floor boards, farming equipment
, cartwheels, anything created in wood.

  Leon was sitting on a packing box in the yard as weak snow slanted across the light from the lamps hanging from the main beam across the open doors of the workshop. With his gloves cut to leave the fingers exposed he tried to sketch what he was seeing. Even though it was cold he still had to try and draw what was in front of him. He loved to come after school to watch and sketch Uncle David’s carpenters. They appeared so confident and relaxed in what they were doing and yet to Leon the whole thing was a mystery.

  He was now in his seventeenth year, stocky in build with a round face and black curly hair that was hidden under a fur hat he pulled far down over his dark eyes. In the summer he would wear light boots, baggy trousers, a waistcoat and collarless shirt. But as it got colder he would put on his long winter coat that came down to his ankles and heavier, padded boots. In the middle of his long nose was a small birth mark, a tiny piece of dark brown skin that often he would poke at in the mirror until he made it bleed.

  ‘So what’s education for?’ was one of uncle’s favourite questions, ‘Is it to produce people who just pass on knowledge from one generation to the next to do exactly the same? They actually produce nothing. Their world, like your father’s, is all in the mind, whereas here we have practical solutions to things that need fixing. These men are what education should be about. They build things. They change things. That’s what this country needs, more joiners and stonemasons and road builders and all the rest. That’s what schooling should be about.’

  Leon was always uneasy with the men. To him they were magicians casting their wooden spells.

  ‘You should try it,’ uncle had told him, ‘So long as you don’t tell your father I suggested it. Become a part time apprentice. Old Petro will show you. Make a chair or a table or something.’

  ‘I couldn’t do it,’ was always his answer.

  ‘Nonsense,’ David laughed.