The Fires of Lilliput

by Michael Martin

  “Strip,” they barked. The word marked a cadence for their feet. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. “Strip, Strip, Strip, Strip. Strip, Strip, Strip, Strip.”

  Clothes fell from one person after another and the sanitary personnel gathered clothes and emptied pockets and confiscated jewelry. One man resisted so the soldiers took him into the street and they took a woman, though she wasn’t resisting but standing silently and shivering. The soldiers yelled at the others in the line and raised their crops and beat the man and the woman in the face and the backs of the legs. After enough screaming, the soldiers pushed the man and woman back among the others.

  Shosha looked up and down the lines, at the old women with stretch marks and birthing scars and atrophied muscles grasping at round flabby bellies that overhung thin, shaky legs. She looked at the young women, the muscles of labor, the firm, tight skin, and the marks of the sun and little scars on arms and legs, and breasts that were still high. She looked at the surgical scars, the marks, the moles, the bruises and the malformations. She looked at all the things once covered, now bare, all the things strangers were never supposed to see. Young propped up old and everyone looked away from the soldiers, who were laughing and ogling, spitting on the ground, sated and bored after a few eyefuls.

  Shosha heard screams and cries coming from the mykwa. She looked at Leiozia as they rounded the corner and entered through the large double doors. The soldiers herded the lines toward the screams, into showers. They pushed Shosha in, then Leiozia, and the freezing water stung them until their bodies went stiff and their ears went deaf to the screaming and the stumbling crowd pushed them out and they stood, dripping and numb.

  The wet, stark bodies moved toward more women dressed as nurses. The nurse’s gloved hands opened the mouth. She sent her fingers prying into the nose and ears. She ran her fingers through the hair. She folded back the eyelids and probed the belly button. She slapped apart the legs and directed a lamp and spread the anus and fingered any hemorrhoids until she felt a wince. She turned the body around, into the light, then spread the vagina, first with two fingers, then four. Everyone—men and women—could see. The nurse spread each toe. Then she stood and yelled.

  “Clean!”

  Shosha stepped up. She stood bare with a ready fist. The nurse opened Shosha’s mouth, pried into her nose and her ears. The gloved fingers spread through her hair. The nurse moved down Shosha’s body and her fist tightened and she looked at the guards at both doors. The nurse moved her hand down but Shosha grabbed it by the wrist before it could touch her vagina. The nurse looked up. Shosha narrowed her eyes and held the wrist. The nurse looked at the guard, then at Shosha, who looked down at her other hand, the fist. The nurse looked at the fist too and watched it open to a wad of cash, wet and crumpled. The nurse tugged at her wrist and Shosha’s fist snapped shut. The nurse looked at Shosha. She placed her free hand on Shosha’s fist and pulled the probing hand Shosha held. Shosha partly opened her fist and the nurse opened her hand and wrapped her fingers around the cash. Shosha grabbed the nurse’s fingers and the cash. She motioned with her eyes at Leiozia.

  “Her too,” Shosha said.

  The nurse stood.

  “Clean,” she announced.

  Shosha’s hand snapped open and released the nurse’s wrist. Another woman dressed in white pulled Shosha away, toward a pile of wet clothes that stunk with disinfectant. Shosha pulled out her damp shrunken sweater and searched the pile and watched the nurse’s hands stop at Leiozia’s belly.

  “Clean,” the nurse said.

  Leoizia and Shosha searched through the clothes and pulled out what they could find. The whites were so discolored and the woolens so shrunken they couldn’t be certain which clothes belonged to them. In twenty minutes of standing naked on the cold tile floor rummaging with the others and listening to screams and loud voices, they finally had enough to wear so they hurried out, past the guard at the side door and into the fading brightness of the late afternoon.

  “I just want to be warm,” Shosha told Leiozia. They ran through alleys. When they approached their house at 38 Pawia Street, they saw the front door open. Shosha ran up the steps and saw the inside and stiffened. Leiozia came up beside her, out of breath.

  “My L-rd in Heaven,” Leiozia said.

  The place reeked of carbolic acid and all the clothes from drawers and closets were piled in the center of each room. The “sanitary staff” had torn down curtains and drapes and drenched the beds and rugs in the pungent disinfectant. Shosha picked up a feather pillow, but the down was so saturated that quills poked through the cloth and bit her fingers. She hurled the pillow at a mirror.

  “Fuckers,” she screamed. “Why did they do this?”

  Shosha sat in a chair that sank and gurgled and she cried. Leiozia wrapped her arms around Shosha’s neck and kissed her face.

  “What will mother say?” Shosha asked. “What will she say when she sees this?”

  Rebekah had already seen it and had cried for an hour. When she finally walked out of the house, she left the door open. She walked up the street without looking back and thought for a long time in the afternoon that she might never return.

  EVEN NOW, NEAR THE END OF SPRING, THE SMELL of the disinfectant sometimes drove Shosha outside, where she stood on the stoop in the evening breeze in a cloud of her mother’s French perfume. Leiozia stood with her and lit a thin cigarette and drew and watched the orange tip glow in the dim light of carbide lamps and candles in windows. The street lamp had been dead for a month.

  “I swear to you on Talmud that I will someday kill as many of them as I can,” Shosha said.

  “Amen—but there is one good one.”

  Shosha took the cigarette and drew on it and handed it back.

  “One of the blueys on Dzielna St.,” Leiozia said. “For a pack of cigarettes and a hundred zlotys, he lets the boys pass under the wall.”

  “Tell them to get us more bread,” Shosha said. “The Judenrat wants too much bribes for the ration cards.”

  Rebekah stepped onto the stoop carrying a tray of coffee and slices of a soft cake with a silky layer of crystalline sugar along its brown crust.

  “That looks wonderful,” Leiozia said. “Where did you get it?”

  “Rabbi—he has a parcel of them,” Rebekah said. “From the States.”

  Rebekah lay the tray on the stoop and sat. Shosha squeezed a perfume atomizer over her mother’s head.

  “Do I stink?” Rebekah said.

  “No,” Shosha said. “It’s a sign of affection in these times.”

  Rebekah wrapped her hand around Shosha’s neck and pulled her face close and kissed her on the forehead and kissed her hair.

  “Rabbi wants to celebrate New Year,” Rebekah said. “He’s making plans.”

  “What about Tashlich?” Leiozia said. “How do we find enough water?”

  Rebekah raised a china cup to her lips, careful to avoid a chip on its rim.

  “I’ll remind him,” she sipped, “that we cannot cleanse our sins in the sewers.”

  “You’d better do it soon,” Shosha said. “They’re threatening to close the ghetto.”

  “Just as papa’s ready to come for a visit,” Rebekah said.

  “Papa?” Shosha said. “Where did you hear this?”

  “Rabbi. The Home Army says they want to let him home for a respite.”

  “Rabbi, rabbi, rabbi,” Shosha said. “Is there a miracle of which this man is not capable?”

  “The miracle will be getting papa home,” Rebekah said. “I think it’s two pipes shy of a pipe dream.”

  “You know they beat Adam today,” Leiozia said.

  “Adam—our Adam, Czerniakow?”

  “They want his loyalty,” Shosha said.

  “Fine way to get it,” Rebekah said.

  “They’re cramming too many people in here,” Leiozia said. “They can’t afford even a peep of dissent.” She drew on her cigarette. “It makes me sick—they fractured Adam
’s jaw.”

  “Rabbi has mentioned a revolt,” Rebekah said. “The idea has many supporters.”

  Leiozia smoked the last centimeter of her cigarette then flicked the ashes into the street, where they flared and fell like Lilliputian firecrackers. She slipped another cigarette out of her pocket and lit it.

  “You’re living luxuriously over there, woman,” Shosha said. She motioned with two fingers and Leiozia passed the cigarette. Shosha drew on it and watched the thin sleeve burn back from the glowing tobacco embers. She flicked them off and they fluttered to the street in another tiny pyrotechnic display.

  “Live free or die,” Shosha said and she handed the cigarette back to Leiozia.

  A HUMID SUMMER YIELDED TO THE FALL and the high holy season of Tishri. The rabbi spent September making plans for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur and the Festival of Sukkot right after.

  “I’m fretting about all this,” he told Rebekah. “The logistics are impossible.”

  Rosh Hashanah—the Jewish New Year and the beginning of Tishri—fell on the third and fourth days of October 1940. Although Leviticus 23:24-25 institutes the New Year, the Bible never uses the name Rosh Hashanah, but instead refers to the holiday as Yom Ha-Zikkaron—the Day of Remembrance—or Yom Teruah—the Day of the Sounding of the Shofar, a ram’s horn blown like a trumpet. Hearing its four distinct notes, each lasting for different intervals, is an essential observance of Tishri’s commencement. On each day of the New Year, one hundred shofar notes sound, in what some say is a call to repent.

  No Jew labored on Rosh Hashanah and because the Germans had closed the synagogues, Rabbi held traveling services in basements and empty buildings. But he didn’t have a shofar and no one knew anyone who did. On the warm early evening of October 4th, the rabbi returned from his ministry and knocked at the back door of the Mordechai house.

  “We’re ready?” he asked Leiozia. He was carrying a bag.

  “Yes,” she said. “I’m getting goose bumps.” Leiozia, Shosha and Rebekah stepped down the back steps and followed the rabbi through the alley. He led them to the wall.

  “Put these on,” he said. He passed around wigs from the bag.

  They each crawled through an opening in the wall and on the Aryan side they walked in the dark. They saw only one German gendarme, but he was talking to a girl. They made it down to the Wisla.

  “I don’t know why,” Rebekah said. “But when Leiozia brought this up, I hadn’t thought of the river.”

  Poland’s longest river, the Wisla flowed through Warsaw on its way to the Baltic Sea, separating the city from its neighboring suburb, Praga. It carried water through several cities, including Gdansk, Krakow, and Oswiecim, otherwise known as the city of Auschwitz. At the river’s edge, Rabbi said a quiet prayer and they took what they had in their pockets and cast it into the water. “L’shanah tovah tikatevi v’taihatemi,” the rabbi prayed. “May you be inscribed and sealed for a good year.”

  This was Tashlich, the “casting off,” and Leiozia was so moved she cried.

  ON YOM KIPPUR—THE DAY OF ATONEMENT—the Germans in Warsaw officially created the largest Jewish ghetto in the world and published a map with the boundaries. Soldiers forced out 113,000 non-Jewish Poles to make way for 138,000 Jews, cramming thirty percent of the city’s population into two percent of the city’s area.

  Augie Pasquale saw irony in the ritual restrictions of Yom Kippur. He joked to his Sztuka audience about fasting for twenty five hours (“I don’t know about you, but most people here have been doing this for twenty five months.”); washing and bathing (“Bath? Since when?”); wearing leather shoes (he took a tattered shoe from a man in the audience and held it up and examined it. “Yup—it’s leather—I think.”)

  The audience roared.

  In a makeshift synagogue, where an open cabinet displayed the scrolls of a Torah, Rabbi Gimelman concluded Yom Kippur. Everyone stood for this hour-long service.

  “This is the closing of the gates,” the rabbi told them. “We go into the next day cleansed and renewed.”

  The Holy Season’s final festival, “Sukkot seems misplaced now,” the rabbi said to Shosha. “It’s not a particular celebration anymore. It’s a way of life, but without much joy.”

  The Festival of Sukkot (Sue-coat) began that year on October 17, the fifth day after Yom Kippur. It is supposed to be a time of joy, but seemed like a return to the wandering it commemorated, in a desert without sand.

  “Sukkot” means “booths,” or the temporary, makeshift dwellings G-d commanded the Israelites to inhabit during their wandering. “You will dwell in booths for seven days; all natives of Israel shall dwell in booths.” Leviticus 23:42

  Before, the Mordechais built a makeshift celebratory sukkah (the singular noun) in their home, taking their meals in it for a week. Now “any reasonably sound dwelling in this forsaken wilderness will qualify,” the rabbi instructed. When Shosha was younger, she used to sleep in the sukkah, and make a big deal about its careful construction. A sukkah must have precisely two and a half walls because one of the Hebraic letters in the word “sukkah” has two and a half sides. The walls may be of any size or any material—except the pillows Shosha tried to use one year, because wind can cast away pillows, and the walls of a sukkah must be solid. The roof of the sukkah must be made of a plant cut from the ground. Tree branches, corn stalks, bamboo reeds, sticks, or planed two-by-fours will work. It must be loose enough to let in rain and stars, but tight enough that there is never more light than shade.

  The Mordechai family always decorated their Sukkot—with artwork, paper cutouts, unique ornaments, or pictures. To her Christian friends who sometimes helped, Shosha likened it to decorating a Christmas tree.

  Neighbors gathered for this year’s festival created a community sukkah from a damaged building seven doors down from the Mordechais.

  “Seven dwellings away,” the rabbi said. “I like that.”

  Rabbi closed Sukkot with a prayer that the Messiah would come within the next year, at which time prophecy said Jews would slay a Leviathan and build next year’s sukkah from the skin of the beast.

  “Y’hi ratzon mil’fanekha Adonai Eloheinu vei’lohei avoteinu”

  May it be Your will, L-rd, our G-d and G-d of our ancestors

  “k’sheim shekiyam’ti v’yashav’ti basukah zu”

  that just as I have stood up and dwelled in this sukkah

  “kein ez’keh l’shanah haba’ah leisheiv b’sukat oro shel liv’yatan”

  so may I merit next year to dwell in the sukkah of the hide of the Leviathan.

  “l’shanah haba’ah birushalayim.”

  Next year in Jerusalem!

  After Sukkot, Rabbi closed the Holy Season with Shemini Atzeret and Simchat Torah. Of the holy days, Rabbi best liked Shemini Atzeret —“the assembly of the eighth day”—because at this time G-d was inviting him and his people not to leave just yet, not to say goodbye, but to stay just one more day. For Simchat Torah—“Rejoicing in the Torah”—Rabbi read from the scrolls. The people carried on this quiet celebration, muted but elegant. The day ended as the season had begun—with distant gunfire and hope nearby.

  Four

  The Germans closed the ghetto on November 14th and halted all food supplies. Prices rose while currency fell and black marketeers refused paper cash, insisting on gold or silver coins or diamonds. The occupiers ordered death for persons who aided the Jews. For Jews crossing the wall: fines, arrest, and imprisonment at the Jewish prison on Gesia Street.

  Shosha inventoried the coal in the cellar. Leiozia went from street to street looking for bread. Rebekah stayed late in bed, staring at the ceiling. Frost came that night and stayed into the next day.

  Shosha was the first to hear three knocks at the door to the back alley, followed by a pause, then two knocks, then three again. She ran up from the cellar and opened the door and swept Rabbi Gimelman into the house in her arms.

  “Rabbi! Is it good to see you.”

  He kissed
her cheek and held her face in both his hands, cold in leather gloves.

  “How is the loveliest young woman in Warsaw?”

  “I wouldn’t say that.”

  “I was talking about your mother.” He pressed her face.

  “Rabbi.”

  He kissed Shosha’s forehead and walked to Rebekah, standing in the entrance way.

  “Are you trying to flatter me out of my funk?” Rebekah asked.

  “What’s to be in a funk about?” He pulled a cloth bag from his coat pocket and handed it to her. Rebekah peered into it.

  “Rabbi—there must be a fortune here.”

  “Help me with the boxes,” he said, and he led them to the back stoop. They carried in thick, corrugated cardboard boxes filled with potatoes, bread, and sausages.

  “You can feed an army with this, for a little while,” the rabbi said. He was short of breath and he set a bag of wheat flour on a shelf. “They’ve changed the boundaries again,” he said. “I paid hell and a large bribe to get this here. I went by one of my usual routes, thinking, of course, I’m still in the district. Turns out I wasn’t.”

  “They’re adding more people, I heard,” Leiozia said. She opened the door to the cellar and took hold of a bag of potatoes.

  “Shrinking the place and adding more people,” Rebekah said. “Tell me the logic in that?”

  Leiozia descended the cellar stairs with the potatoes. “It’s a logical way to torment,” she said. “You want to hear something else?” She was in the cellar now. She stepped up the stairs. “Apparently Lichtenbaum and his sons made a fortune building that wall.”