The Fires of Lilliput

by Michael Martin

  “What’s that?” Shosha said.

  “The wall—they helped build it.”

  “Our wall?” Rebekah asked. “Our cage?”

  “They got a contract from the Germans and free labor from the prison.”

  “You’re kidding,” Shosha said. “Where did you hear this?”

  “It’s around,” the rabbi interrupted. “It’s old news.”

  “Old news that Jews helped imprison us for money?” Shosha asked.

  “It’s outrageous if it’s true,” Rebekah said.

  “It’s true all right,” Leiozia said. “I’ve seen the paperwork—with Lichtenbaum’s signatures.”

  “How did you see that?” Shosha asked.

  “They’ll show anyone who wants to see—especially Jews,” Leiozia said. “Just go to the governor’s office—they’re quite proud of it. A Jewish traitor who sold out to them for a few zlotys.”

  “It’s terrible—terrible,” Shosha said. She slammed the side of her fist on a cabinet door. “How could the Lichtenbaums do a thing like that?”

  “Money,” Rebekah said.

  “Not entirely,” the rabbi said. He let the words settle.

  “What do you mean?” Shosha asked.

  The rabbi lifted the bag of gold and silver coins from a table.

  “I mean, not entirely,” he said.

  Shosha breathed in a deep, frustrated way.

  “Are you saying our anger is misplaced?” she asked. “Did Lichtenbaum give you the money?”

  The rabbi said nothing.

  “Did you take it?”

  “A little of both,” he said finally. “I was persuasive and Lichtenbaum was persuaded.”

  Rebekah saw her daughter about to speak again.

  “You’ll stay with us tonight, I hope?” Rebekah said.

  The rabbi, so animated before, now hesitated. “The imposition,” he said.

  “How?” Shosha interjected.

  “You don’t need to be feeding me….” the rabbi asked.

  “No—how did you persuade Lichtenbaum?”

  “You will stay with us?” Rebekah asked again.

  “We need another warm body,” said Leiozia, coming up the cellar stairs again.

  “You don’t need me taking up space,” the rabbi said.

  “So you won’t answer me,” Shosha said.

  “You won’t be imposing,” Rebekah said. She was helping Leiozia up the stairs.

  “I know things,” the rabbi said to Shosha.

  “You blackmailed him?” Shosha asked.

  “We’ll even feed you,” Rebekah called from the stairs.

  “Black and white mail,” the rabbi quipped.

  “What?”

  “It’s all in black and white, and I intended to mail it.”

  “Mail what? Mail it where?”

  “Shosha,” Rebekah said, breathless on the stairs. “Enough questions already.”

  “Photos,” Shosha blurted. “You have photos of Lichtenbaum doing something he shouldn’t.”

  “You are a devil, rabbi,” Leiozia said.

  “That depends on your perspective.”

  THEY LAY IN ONE BED TOGETHER, SIX OF THEM, including two boarders and the rabbi. The coal fire warmed the room into the dark, but the warmth faded. The awful cold from the river winds dropped the temperature to twenty-four below zero centigrade, enough to freeze a fully-clothed man wrapped in underwear and a coat and heavy socks and boots.

  The rabbi and the others burrowed under four layers of blankets and long woolen underwear, and two of them wore coats, and still they felt ripples of cold with every flick of an eyelid or turn of a cheek.

  “I’m worried for her.” Rebekah spoke softly to the rabbi. Next to him on the other side, Leiozia slept. “How can a young person not emerge from something like this warped, if they live?”

  “Shosha’s too straight and strong to be bent by the likes of this,” the rabbi said.

  “And Lev?” Rebekah asked. The rabbi turned and faced her.

  “He’s coming back,” the rabbi said.

  “When?”

  The rabbi lifted his hand from beneath the blankets and cupped Rebekah’s cheek in his palm, warm from the heat they shared. She circled his wrist in her fingers and brought his palm to her lips and kissed it after a hesitation. She kissed it again and pressed it harder to her lips and her nose. The rabbi didn’t draw away, but let his hand stay with her, pliable until she choked on tears. He pulled her close to him, her hair under his chin and her lips on his neck where her fractured sobs settled into a low weeping, muffled in this tumble-down arrangement, a muted bereavement.

  Someone pounded on the Mordechai’s door. Rebekah sat up and wiped the frost from a window in the upstairs bedroom. She looked down at the empty street and then up, toward the sky. A cold haze over the city made the sun pale and small. Rebekah heard the knocking again. She crawled over the others, out of bed. She slipped on a robe that had an orange stain running along its side where carbolic splashed it during the last “sanitary inspection.” She hurried down the stairs and opened the door to a man with a rifle butt poised to knock with it again. He lurched in with two other men and pushed her aside.

  “Where is Lev Mordechai?” the man said. He wore a black suit with markings on his lapel.

  “Not here,” she said.

  “You’re his wife?” another man said.

  “Yes.”

  “Wives lie for their husbands.”

  “I’m not lying,” Rebekah said. “He’s away in the war.”

  “Kennkarte.” The man put his hand out for her “Reich Identification Card.”

  “I don’t…”

  “Right here, Herr Obersturmführer.” Rabbi Gimelman strode down the stairs. He handed the twenty-something man a sheaf of papers. The man held them up to the light and Rebekah saw the German eagle stamp on each sheet.

  “What do you want with my husband?”

  “These papers appear to be in order.” He returned them to the rabbi. “We have orders to search this house.”

  “Certainly,” the rabbi said. He looked at Rebekah.

  “Where is his room?”

  “Whose room?” Rebekah asked.

  “Lev Mordechai! His room or study—any place he kept a desk.”

  The rabbi encouraged Rebekah with his eyes.

  “This way,” Rebekah told the men. She led them up the stairs and opened a door to a room with a shabby desk and a bed barren of linens. The men went to the desk and opened the drawers.

  “Shosha?” Rebekah whispered to the rabbi.

  “In bed—I told them all to stay put.”

  The men pulled out papers, crinkled and blotched, and threw them on the mattress. One man went to the door, another sat on the mattress, and the third sat in a chair. They held the papers up to the dim light that glowed through the sleet on the window.

  “Ledgers, it looks like—I can’t tell.”

  “Shit.”

  “What happened here?”

  “Lev did his bookwork, sometimes his…”

  “Nein, nein—the ink’s marred.”

  “You don’t know what happened?”

  “That’s why I’m asking.”

  “They disinfected us,” Rebekah said.

  The agents looked at one another.

  “I’ve never heard of such a thing,” the second man said. “Did they disinfect the papers?”

  “Yes.”

  “With what?”

  “Carbolic,” the rabbi said.

  “Fucking idiots.”

  The men looked under the bed and in the closet. They found a small strong box and burst it open with the rifle butt. They flipped it over and water and carbolic acid dripped out with bills, a few coins, and papers ringed with ink that used to form words.

  “Who gave this order?”

  “The Governor General gives all the orders,” the rabbi said.

  “Fuck!”

  “Who else lives here?”

 
“Only us,” Rebekah said.

  “And if we search?”

  “You waste more time,” the rabbi said. “If, instead, you leave the house and go to the wall at the end of the street and remove the third stone from the curb along the bottom-most layer, there you will find something that will have made your trip here worthwhile.”

  “And if we search anyway and I shoot you in the head?”

  “Then the wall stops giving,” the rabbi said.

  The men looked at one another. They moved past Rebekah and the rabbi and tramped down the stairs.

  “Heil Hitler,” one of them said at the door.

  “When Hell freezes,” the rabbi said. He watched the men cross the street toward the wall.

  Rebekah saw her breath in the cold air. “It already has,” she said. She locked the door and wrapped herself in the robe. “What’s in the wall?” she asked.

  “Chocolate and cigarettes,” the rabbi said. “And a little schnapps—put hair on their chests. They need it.”

  THE HEALTH DEPARTMENT ASSIGNED SHOSHA and Rabbi Gimelman for typhus inoculations at the same time, a little trick of the rabbi’s bribery purse. His presence in the ghetto was not officially documented and he was not on any assignment lists, so with money he could control a bit of destiny. They stood together on Leszno Street and the rabbi watched a horse drawing a wobbly carriage from stop to stop. When it first appeared a few blocks down, the carriage absorbed entire passengers. But as it moved closer, feet, then hands, then heads and bags and coattails and finally entire bodies hung from the rails on the side. The carriage stumbled and halted. The rabbi held Shosha’s hand as he pushed their way on board.

  “One way, sixty groszy,” the driver said.

  “Raw capitalism alive and well,” the rabbi said. He handed coins to the driver.

  They created a space to stand and a place to grip and held each other and fell backward whenever the carriage lurched. It moved up the block then stopped for a white van with a red cross. Shosha watched men in white smocks and soldiers carry bodies down the steps of a three-story building. The carriage pulled around the van and rambled on. A stench penetrated the cold. The carriage stopped. The man next to Shosha craned his head over the others.

  “Don’t stop here,” he yelled. “Stupid fuck,” he said to Shosha.

  “What is it?” Shosha gasped. She couldn’t see the other side of the street over all the heads.

  “Somebody died,” the man said.

  “How do you know?” Shosha said.

  “The body’s in the street,” the man said.

  “They leave the bodies in the street?” Shosha said.

  The man looked at her. “Where do you live?”

  Shosha hesitated. “Pawia,” she said.

  “North or south?

  Shosha hesitated again.

  “Don’t worry. I won’t rob you.”

  “North.”

  “That explains it.”

  Shosha looked at him.

  “They clean the streets up there,” the man said.

  “This is awful,” said the woman next to Shosha as people held their noses and tried to turn toward better air.

  “Get this heap moving,” the man yelled.

  “Get going!”

  “Go, Go, Go, Go.” The crowd chanted and stamped their feet, then cheered when the carriage crept forward.

  The rabbi and Shosha stood in another long line inside a dark warehouse, next to rows of bodies stacked along a wall—the recently dead who smelled only a little. Two hours later they emerged in the chill air and the orange hue of the setting sun in the low clouds along the horizon.

  “Five hundred zlotys,” the rabbi said. “Who can afford this?”

  “Did you get an assignment for mama? And Leiozia?”

  “Oh yes—weeks ago. That took plenty of money, too. That’s the idea. Keep the price of shots so high everybody dies.”

  “People aren’t dying of typhus,” Shosha said.

  “The prices are ridiculous. Insane.”

  They walked toward a gate along the wall and children came begging. The rabbi gave one coin to each child. He kept his pocket filled, like bird feed in a park full of pigeons. A girl of about five held out her hands. Shosha considered the girl then stooped to pick her up.

  “I wouldn’t,” the rabbi said.

  Shosha picked up the girl anyway. Her clothes were dirty and she smelled. She clutched Shosha around the neck.

  “Will you take me?” the girl asked.

  “Take you? Where?” Shosha said, watching the rabbi turn his head from side to side.

  “Home,” the girl said.

  “Where is your home? I don’t know where it is.”

  “To your home,” the girl chirped.

  “I don’t know. I’d have to ask my mama and you’d have to ask yours.”

  “I don’t have a mama,” the girl said.

  While the gate sentry was turned away talking to an old man, two boys and another girl ran past Shosha and through the gate to the Aryan side. The children stopped on the far side of the street and held out their hands to passers by. The sentry turned away from the old man. He walked toward Shosha and the rabbi. The girl squirmed in Shosha’s arms.

  “Kennkarte,” the sentry said to them.

  “Papers, always papers,” the rabbi said.

  Shosha set the girl down. She ran off.

  “Good thing,” the rabbi said. He pulled a wad of papers from his jacket while Shosha produced a neat folder. The sentry looked at the rabbi’s papers, signed and stamped by bribed and high-ranking members of the propaganda ministry who relied on foreign entertainers to produce stage shows in Berlin.

  “Impressive,” the sentry said. He handed the documents back to the rabbi and took Shosha’s papers. “Wait here,” he said to her and walked toward his station where he kept a list of ghetto residents. A few steps from where he had turned and not seen the Jewish children on the Aryan side, he now saw them, darting in and out of foot traffic pleading for handouts.

  “Little bastards.” He undid the strap on his holster, pulled his pistol, aimed and fired.

  “Oy vey! He’s shooting at them,” Shosha said. She started toward the sentry but the rabbi grabbed her arm.

  “Don’t,” he said.

  “He’s shooting them,” she cried, and the rabbi held her tight. He turned her eyes away and pressed her head against his shoulder.

  The sentry shot the little beggars, one in the head, the other in the side and the last in the back. The children fell but no one stopped. The right foot and left arm of the one shot in the head twitched. The others were still. The sentry holstered his pistol.

  “Did he kill them?” Shosha said. “Let me see. I need to see.”

  “You don’t need to see,” the rabbi said.

  “Oh Lord why, why, why?” Shosha cried through hyperventilated puffs. “Why did these have to be sacrificed?”

  “It’s not a sacrifice, not to G-d,” the rabbi said.

  “God, God—how can He sit up there and let this happen down here?”

  The rabbi took her shoulders. “Don’t blaspheme,” he said.

  She pushed away and he saw her face, red and streaked with tears. She looked up.

  “Help us,” she cried. “Help us,” she yelled. “Help us, goddamn you, help us!”

  The rabbi saw the sentry through the window of the hut.

  “Shosha—stop it.”

  “Help us. Help us. Help us.” She yelled at God. “You son of a bitch!”

  “Stop it.” The rabbi grabbed her face. “Shut up,” he said.

  “Oh, why, why,” Her face dissolved in his hand. “Why, why, why.” She heard the sentry’s boots. “I’ll kill him,” she murmured. “I’ll kill him. Let me go. Let me go!” She pushed against the rabbi, but he pulled her toward a bench, where they sat and where he held her close and turned her away from the street. The sentry stepped up to them and handed the papers to the rabbi.

  “In order
,” he said.

  “Son of a bitch.” Shosha mumbled into the rabbi’s chest, where he held her with particular vigor. He eased his grip after the sentry went away. Shosha cried for a while and then the rabbi didn’t hear her. He looked down and saw her staring. He looked away and saw soldiers prodding prison laborers across the street to the Aryan side, where they picked up the bodies of the three children and threw them into the back of a wagon.

  They sat until the streets were dark. The rabbi felt rhythmic breathing against his chest and knew Shosha was asleep. In the light from the sentry’s hut, he watched the changing of the guard for the evening.

  Five

  The winter of 1942 brought snows that covered bodies in the street and froze them to the ground. Two brothers—Pinkiert—devised a better method to pry up more bodies faster than any one else. They heated picks and shovels in barrels of burning coal on a wagon drawn by two mules, then broke the ice and snow from around and under the corpses, sometimes burning the flesh. This method was better, their workers would explain, than cutting the clothes away and tearing the body from the ice, which could tear flesh from the body, making for double work and making identification more difficult if the body were lying face down. With bribes for the Governor General and funds for supplies and workers, the Pinkiert brothers supported construction of a wooden bridge over the wall to connect the ghetto with Kirkut, the Jewish cemetery. In exchange, they became the ghetto’s preferred funeral providers.

  Shosha and Rebekah sat near a window in their drawing room watching a Pinkiert crew bring a body down the stairs of the row house across the street.

  “Mrs. Fein?” Shosha asked.

  “Too big for Mrs. Fein,” Rebekah said. “Probably a boarder.” Rebekah’s stomach rumbled. “Oh. Pardon me.”

  “Does it ache?”

  “Sometimes.”

  Shosha looked at her mother.

  “All right—all the time,” Rebekah said.

  “Mine aches all the time, too,” Shosha said. “All I dream about is food. Last night I had the best dinner of latkes and a sausage papa made of fresh venison.”

  “Oh don’t say that! With the radishes and steamed tomatoes? Remember that? That was so good!”

  “Thank the L-rd for the rabbi,” Shosha said. “If it weren’t for him, they’d be taking us.”