The Fires of Lilliput

by Michael Martin

  AS LONG AS THE OCCUPIERS CIRCULATED the same currency, the Mordechai family had means to rebuild. They hired villagers—for hard cash and bricks—from the area around their summer estate. A pungent brew of char and decay dictated their first task. They exhumed eighteen bodies from heaps of brick and glass. Shosha helped cover the dead.

  “You’re enthusiastic in your work,” Rebekah told her.

  “Enthusiastic?” Shosha asked.

  “This is the first war for you—how can you help but be excited by it? I was, in my first war.”

  “It’s fear,” Shosha said. “My stomach won’t stay down. I just want to hurry up and get it done.”

  “This is the second war for me and fear is all I feel,” Rebekah said. “My L-rd, where is Papa?” She sat but didn’t cry.

  Rumors circulated the Germans were planning a separate district for Jews, to halt the spread of typhus, they said. The occupiers closed all schools in Warsaw, forcing most Jews into clandestine academies called komplety. Shosha taught mathematics in a komplety for three weeks when the first hard frost coated the windows. Lines formed for coal.

  “It’s freezing!” She slapped her mittens against her legs.

  Leiozia picked up the near-empty coal bucket next to the front door. “The furnace still needs work,” she told Shosha. “They installed the wrong-sized flue. I think they’ll never finish.”

  “At least we can live here.”

  “Barely.”

  Leiozia opened the door but before she could walk out, Shosha took the bucket from her. She wrapped the compulsory Star of David band around her arm.

  “They owe me,” Shosha said. “I’ve been teaching their children for free.”

  The fuel store proprietors took Shosha out of the line and around back. They filled her bucket with coal, extra full, past the top. She dragged the bucket through the alley and into the street, where she saw three German SS troops standing a small man against the remains of a brick wall. She pulled her coal bucket behind a corner. She took off the blue armband and stuffed it into her coat pocket.

  “I am a Pole and will die a Pole,” she heard the small man say.

  “I am a German,” one of the SS men yelled. “Say it.”

  “I am a Pole. I was born in Poland,” the man said again.

  “I am a German and I swear allegiance to mein Führer and the Reich,” said the SS officer.

  “I am a Pole,” the man said. “A Pole I will die.”

  “Ja, apparently.” The other SS turned the man around. He shook but stood fast. The soldiers laughed. Shosha thought she heard gunfire, but she couldn’t be sure because shots echoed from other parts of the city. She moved away as fast as her load would allow.

  ENTRANCE FORBIDDEN TO POLES AND JEWS.

  Nur Für Deutsche.

  The Germans divided the city with signs like these on restaurants, museums, parks, and other public places. The cold—it reached minus fifteen degrees centigrade—provided the occupiers another way to remove the occupied. They rationed food and coal so tightly fewer and fewer people could survive the winter. In February 1940, temperatures dropped to minus twenty five degrees centigrade.

  “Oh L-rd—my L-rd child, where have you been? How did this happen?”

  Shosha’s feet were blue-black with early signs of frostbite. Rebekah rubbed in paraffin oil. “If you can’t even walk to the komplety without the cold seeping in, then you can’t go out at all,” Rebekah said.

  “I stood in line for coal,” Shosha said. “It’s in the bucket”

  “You have stockings and thick shoes—how long did you stand?”

  “Long. They’re almost out.”

  Rebekah looked in the coal bucket. “For this?” she said. “How long?”

  Shosha hesitated and stared at her feet.

  “How long?” Rebekah raised her voice.

  “Four hours,” Shosha said. “Four hours. Tomorrow it will be six.”

  “How much more of this can we stand?” Rebekah said. She looked at her daughter and the coal. “Come on. We’ll use it to warm some water.”

  “So I go out only to have the coal used up on me?” Shosha asked.

  “Doesn’t make sense, does it?” Rebekah said.

  She took her daughter’s arm and helped her up the stairs to the second floor. They were careful because the carpenters never completed the handrails.

  “SHOSHA!”

  The sun was rising. Shosha lay in bed. She felt Leiozia’s hand on her shoulder.

  “What is it?” Shosha mumbled.

  “Shhh,” Leiozia said. “Everyone’s still asleep.” She motioned Shosha to the window. “Look.”

  “What?”

  “They’re fencing us in.”

  “What? Who’s doing this?”

  Leiozia led Shosha to the back door. They each put on a wrap and walked out, in the cold through the alley. They heard loud voices and shouting.

  “Schnell, schnell, Schweine banditen!”

  At the end of the alley, they peered around the building.

  “What is this?” Shosha asked. “What are they doing?”

  Piles of bricks, cement, and broken glass squatted around a trench. A few SS and other uniformed Germans stood and smoked and spit chewing tobacco. Men in prison rags were digging.

  “They’re waiting for more prisoners to help,” Leiozia said. “I heard them say so.”

  “How can you be sure this is a fence?” Shosha asked.

  “We’ve all heard the talk—about the Jewish district,” Leiozia said. She sighed and started biting the nail on her forefinger. “What else could it be?”

  The prison workers used war waste to erect walls across Swietokrzyska, Zlota, Freta, and Smocza Streets. Raised from rubble, the walls were three stories high and remarkably similar. The residents of Okopwa and Pawia streets called a meeting at the Mordechai house. Their wall was several meters high and growing.

  “It’s for security,” Josek Lodr said. “For us.”

  “I don’t think they care about our security,” Rebekah Mordechai said. “Why should they?”

  “It could be for the children,” Mrs. Stryzinsckzi pointed out. “They play in areas that make the Germans nervous. Too close to the prison, sometimes, and the guard stations.”

  “We should ask them,” Shosha said.

  “Ask them? You’re a crazy child,” Mr. Piermanski said. “You don’t just go up and ask these pigs anything.”

  But Shosha did, a few hours later.

  “What are you putting up here?”

  “Weg, weg, Jude!” the soldier barked at her.

  “I’m only asking,” Shosha said. “I’m not going to bite.”

  “No?” said the soldier. “I hear you do.”

  Shosha was a woman of notable features—clean and open. The young soldier liked what he saw. He grinned.

  “Little rat—ee ee ee ee ee.” He shriveled his nose and nibbled the air.

  “And you’re a pig,” Shosha said.

  The soldier raised his rifle. “What did you call me?”

  “A pig,” she coughed.

  He aimed. “I could splatter your brains all over this nice wall,” he said. He touched the barrel to her chin. She thought he must be about eighteen or nineteen. The Germans didn’t waste the seasoned soldiers here.

  “Better for me to die than live with a pig,” Shosha said.

  “You’re brave,” he said. He lowered the rifle. “Now go play with the other rats—ee ee ee ee ee.”

  She walked away. She looked back once and the pig was laughing, biting the air and hissing, like a rat.

  “I’m not such a pig,” he said. “I didn’t shoot you. You’re a very pretty rat.”

  SHOSHA HEARD SOMETHING ONE NIGHT and went out the back door to the alley. She never used the front door—no one used front doors anymore. She peered around the street and saw a man in uniform digging near the bottom of the wall. He cast a silhouette against the street in the moon. After he loosed some bricks, he stoo
d straight. Shosha couldn’t tell what uniform he wore, but could see it was not Polish. It looked disheveled, at least in the poor light. The Germans wore their uniforms in the spit and polish fashion. The man turned and wiped his forehead.

  “Hello,” he called out.

  She ducked back. He turned and went back to his digging. She slipped her head around the building again.

  “If you want to watch more closely,” he said, “you certainly may.”

  Shosha looked around. The street was deserted. She stepped from behind the wall and walked toward the man.

  “If we take out enough of these bricks, you can get to your schools without going round the guards,” the man said. “And you won’t have to put on that stupid arm band.”

  Shosha closed the gap between them and saw a stack of bricks and a hole near the bottom of the wall. “You could be shot for this,” she said.

  The man turned to her. He wore an armband with a swastika and an officer’s cap with a dull iron eagle. His belt buckle needed polish and his shoes were muddy and scuffed. Shosha frowned.

  “I’m afraid I’m not much of a soldier,” he said. He took off the cap and she saw in the dim light his dreadlocks, tied behind the back of his head.

  “Azar Gimelman.” He extended his hand to her. “I’m from Krakow and your tata sent me.”

  Shosha’s legs went limp.

  “Papa?” her voice quivered.

  “He thought you could use the services of a resourceful rabbi.”

  “He’s alive? Where?”

  “In Krakow. He is fighting, but they have not called up the rabbis—yet.”

  Shosha collapsed and the rabbi moved to her and took her in his arms.

  “It’s all right,” he whispered. “You’ll see him again. But we have to make arrangements.”

  “What are you doing here?” Shosha asked. “Why didn’t you come to the house?”

  “I was killing time,” the rabbi said. “I found your house faster than I expected. Lev told me to wait until the wee hours of the morning, when no soldiers were around.”

  Shosha swept her hair from her face and looked at him through an uncomfortable smile and tears.

  “And this ridiculous uniform?” she asked.

  “I got it from a villager selling rags,” the rabbi said. “I don’t want to think where he got it.”

  “Killing time tearing down our wall,” Shosha chuckled. “Papa sent us a brave man or a fool.”

  “A bored man,” the rabbi said. “I was sitting there, on those steps, tucked away, just staring. I kept staring at the bricks. I couldn’t help it when I saw so many loose—such poor craftsmanship these days.”

  “We should get out of the street,” Shosha said.

  “Let me finish.”

  The rabbi loosely put back the dislodged bricks. They looked around before they stepped out of the shadow of the wall and Shosha led the rabbi to the alley and onto her home.

  After sunrise, the rabbi introduced himself to the other members of the household and presented Rebekah a handwritten letter from her husband. She looked at it and her hands shook and she became so dizzy she had to sit. The letter told her to stay safe and obey the rabbi, a man of the highest integrity whom Lev Mordechai had saved from a bullet. She stared at the words but couldn’t focus her eyes enough to read them.

  A FRAGMENTED MOSAIC OF LEADEN-GLASS SHARDS that changed color in the sun spiked the top of the wall around the Jewish district. Gray and red and brown and orange bricks meandered twelve kilometers, like stooping shoulders three meters high. Impatience and fear had weakened the wall in places, where mortar gave way to handfuls of sand, tamped in haste to avoid a beating or a bullet in the jaw. Three strands of barbed wire hung like a clothesline, strung between wooden crosses and V-shaped posts along the wall. A Christian artist from the Aryan side painted a mural on a section of the wall that imagined a crown of thorns surrounding the district. The artist named the entrance gates Gethsemane. The official German name for the enclosed area was Seuchegefahrgebiet, or “district threatened by typhoid.” The German authorities declared the word ghetto strictly verboten.

  Why a medical quarantine required a government separate from the rest of the city puzzled its residents. Governor Ludwig Fischer appointed Adam Czerniakow—president of the Jewish Council of Elders or Judenrat—“district burgermeister.” The Judenrat was a hollow body “in charge” of the health department, food supplies, employment, and the Jewish police.

  The district pulsed with a weak but functional heart of cafes, clubs, classes, seminars, and liquor. Shosha attended a lecture about the new science of quantum physics which involved so-called “imaginary numbers” that seemed as unreal as Warsaw. An “uncertainty principle” applied to quantum objects, where even a researcher with the latest and best technology couldn’t tell the precise whereabouts of a particle. The lecture became popular, with demands for several encores.

  Shosha also helped collect money for covert shopping expeditions into the Aryan section. Children slipped across the wall through Azar Gimelman’s “rabbi hole” under the word L’Chaim someone had scratched across the bricks over the narrow passage. A first team of little bodies distracted the guards or bribed them if enough time had passed since their last military payday. Children from Aryan-Jewish marriages worked best for the first team because they looked less Jewish. When Jewish children from the second team slipped under the wall, they sometimes had to wait in the shadows of gateways and porches of the homes of sympathetic Poles until the guards turned away or changed shifts.

  The same sympathetic Poles dropped food by the edge of the rabbi hole and left notes describing changes in the guard routine for their streets. The children sent signs to one another calling the way clear. They visited the Aryan shops and sometimes bought more than they could carry back alone. It was common to see ragged children in the company of a shopkeeper’s helper walking toward the wall and slipping along it, then disappearing and leaving the helper to return alone.

  On the Jewish side, Shosha and Rabbi Gimelman had to teach the little Fagins to suppress their hunger until they could get the food across the wall. The elders planned to inventory the food and distribute it while the children stood and drooled, clasping a bundle of greens or a loaf of bread or a sack of potatoes with visible roots, their legs quivering and their stomachs audibly rumbling. They cried when Shosha took the bundles and some fell to the ground in a tantrum of delirious longing.

  “For a starving person to see, touch, and smell food and not be able to eat it—could there be a faster route to insanity?” the rabbi asked. They modified the distribution plan so the children ate immediately.

  RABBI GIMELMAN CALLED ON WEALTHY FRIENDS outside the ghetto to open an entertainment center that would feature famous singers and musicians from the outside.

  With investments from the ghetto’s elite and the rabbi’s friends, Sztuka opened on Nalewki Street. Most of the performers were Jews, a few from London, and some from New York—Manhattan and the comedy clubs in Upstate. They slipped in and out of the ghetto with bribes and subterfuge, and the power of American fame. Their entourages generated enough noise and activity to cover the transfer of money and valuables and contraband. A pipeline of contraband—coffee from South America, caviar from Russia, newspapers from New York—kept wealthy patrons coming back. A black market flourished, headquartered in other noisy nightclubs with names such as Palac Melodia and Casa Nova.

  On the day comedian Morris Schwartzman—stage name Augie Pasquale—arrived, the rabbi wrote a letter in his office at Sztuka for Lev Mordechai. Things were better, he said. Life in Warsaw and the Jewish district settled down and food was not so short. He made sure Rebekah saw the letter before he sent it out.

  “Azar.”

  Augie Pasquale was between sets and stood at Sztuka’s bar. The house was full. An intermission band tuned up on stage. Rabbi Gimelman pardoned himself and walked away from a young man dressed in a faded silk suit and a young woman in a
fur.

  The rabbi sat next to the comedian at the bar.

  “So how are you?”

  “I’m well,” Augie said.

  “We’ve barely been able to talk,” the rabbi said.

  “And we must,” Augie said. “I have something for you.” Augie directed both their eyes to his clenched fist below the bar. He opened it to five large diamonds. The smoky light made them glimmer blue.

  “Vodka, straight up,” Augie said to the bartender. “Put it in a tall glass.”

  Augie took the drink from the top of the glass and dropped the diamonds into it. “Forgot to say on the rocks.” He tossed back the vodka. The rabbi grasped Augie’s shoulder and took his hand and hugged him.

  “L’Chaim!” Augie said.

  “L’Chaim!”

  TWO MEN IN BLACK OVERCOATS HANDED SHOSHA a letter signed by the Governor General ordering “disinfection” for all individuals in the Jewish district and their homes. Typhus remained an enormous threat, the Governor claimed, and so this action was necessary for the health and well being of the children.

  “Mama—look at this,” Shosha said. “Under penalty of law,” she read, “you must report not later than April 15 to the sanitary station in your district. They’re the old mykwas on Spokojna and Dzielna.”

  “It’s crap,” Rebekah said. “What are they up to?”

  “Houses in the district must be left open and unlocked at all times during the sanitation process,” Shosha continued. “Teams will be on the premises to disinfect against all organisms capable of transmitting typhus and other communicable diseases.”

  “Another way to degrade and insult us,” Rebekah said. “So this is what they’ve been up to—concocting this shitty idea.”

  On their assigned day, German and Polish “sanitary personnel” loaded Shosha and Leiozia into a stinking produce truck crammed with people. Everyone stood. The truck bumped and hobbled to the mykwa—a bathhouse—where sanitary personnel opened the trucks and soldiers used leather riding crops to force everyone into two lines—one for men and one for women—that wound around the building and down two blocks. Women dressed as nurses walked down either side of each line.