The Fires of Lilliput

by Michael Martin

  “Rabbi,” the boy said.

  “That rabbi,” the man said. “Let’s cook up a few.”

  “May I?” Rebekah asked the boy. He handed her the bag. Her arm dropped unprepared.

  “Must have been some big chickens,” she said. She untied it and looked in. Four or five, maybe half dozen white egg-shapes clicked against each other with a metallic knock. She reached in and felt one. It was cold. She lifted it out.

  The man in the chair almost leapt out of it. “That’s a grenade!”

  “Oh!” Rebekah dropped it. The man cringed and shut his eyes. The boy picked it up.

  “You have to handle these with great care, rabbi said.” The boy put the grenade back in the bag.

  “Whew.” The boarder had lost his breath. “They’re supposed to look like eggs I suppose,” he said.

  “What should we do with them?” Rebekah asked. “Rabbi’s said nothing about this.”

  “It’s not his plan—it’s from the Underground,” the boy said. “Each person carries one, and if they are beaten, they pull these.” The boy indicated the firing pin and a lever.

  “Suicide,” the boarder said. “The hunger must be getting to Rebbe. It must be getting to all of you if you’d consider a thing like this.”

  Rebekah took the bag into the kitchen and stuffed it on a high shelf. “What I don’t understand is why he gave these to a child,” she said.

  “The soldiers see me but don’t suspect,” the boy said. “And I can squeeze out of tight spots.”

  Rebekah returned with some carrots and radishes and offered them to the boy.

  “Rabbi feeds me,” he said.

  “Then for the trip back,” Rebekah said. The boy took one.

  “I could do with one of those,” the boarder said. Rebekah threw a carrot and it landed on his lap. He picked it up and munched. “Beats those eggs,” he said.

  Seven

  All Jews in Warsaw are to be immediately deported to the East. On July 22, 1942, the Judenrat received this instruction from Heinrich Himmler, Hitler’s second in command, and the Governor General, demanding it round up some six thousand people per day for deportation from the Umschlagplatz or “transfer station,” a rail spur north of the ghetto. Gross-Aktion Warsaw had begun and on learning of its aim—the complete annihilation of his people in the city—Judenrat leader Adam Czerniakow swallowed cyanide.

  Ghetto police chief Jozef Szerynski rounded up civilians for deportation with a logistical gusto that surprised even the Germans, who previously arrested and tortured him for fur smuggling. Szerynski implemented daily “house blockades,” or what the occupiers termed “block aids” from 7 to 7:30 each morning. German, Ukrainian, and Jewish police left No.17 Ogrodowa St., heading toward the block selected for that day’s “aid” and shooting any person looking out a window at the ensuing commotion.

  “ALLE HUNTER!”

  “Shosha—get away from there.” Rebekah hissed from the door to the third story bedroom, where her daughter sat near an open window shrouded in a tattered curtain looking out on the close, muggy street.

  “Alle Hunter!” The voices outside tore through the heavy air. Shosha didn’t move.

  “You want to get shot?” Rebekah walked toward the window and stood to the side, out of sight of anyone on the street. Soldiers banged on houses on the next block with their rifles and batons.

  “Look at this,” Shosha said. A soldier dragged a woman down the front steps by her hair. “Adam died for this!”

  People lined up and formed columns at the end of lashing tongues and rifles. Soldiers marched them away, toward trucks that blocked the streets.

  “We’re the next block, mama.”

  “They’re going north, not west. They’ll leave us alone for a while.”

  They heard knocking at the back door downstairs and Leiozia answer it.

  “Bekka,” Leiozia called up. “You have a visitor.”

  Rebekah walked back to the bedroom door. “We have air raid sirens for the purpose of loud alerts,” she called down to Leiozia. She looked at Shosha, still at the window. “Come away from

  there before I tackle you,” she said. Downstairs, she greeted the rabbi cheek to cheek. “You grace us twice in a week,” Rebekah said.

  He kissed her forehead. “We’re saying goodbye to Jerczek,” he said.

  “He’s leaving?” Leiozia asked.

  “He is,” the rabbi said.

  “He’s said nothing about it,” Leiozia said.

  “Leiozia,” Rebekah said.

  “Well, I’ll miss him,” Leiozia said. “Who will take his place?”

  “No one,” the rabbi said. He smiled. “The children are being moved.”

  “Moved?” Rebekah said.

  Shosha walked, step by slow step, down the stairs.

  “I arranged it,” the rabbi said. “Out of the ghetto.”

  “Where are they going?” Leiozia asked.

  “A new facility, nothing like a traditional orphanage,” the rabbi said. “Being built as we speak with dollars, francs, pounds—and more than a few Reichsmarks.”

  “Where? Certainly not here, not in Poland?”

  “In Austria,” the rabbi said. “Near Vienna.”

  “This is wonderful,” Rebekah said. “How did you manage it?”

  “Connections,” the rabbi said. “We’re giving Jerczek a send off tomorrow night at Sztuka. At seven. I came to invite everyone in the house.”

  “When are they leaving?” Shosha asked.

  “I didn’t see you lurking there in the shadows,” the rabbi said. He took her cheek and kissed it.

  “When are they leaving?”

  “Next week.”

  “The facility is finished?” Shosha asked.

  “Not quite. The propaganda ministry—for the purposes of propaganda—will be housing the children in a temporary facility meanwhile.”

  Shosha lost her balance. “The Germans—”

  Leiozia and the rabbi grabbed her arms. Shosha slipped toward the bottom of the stairs, faint but conscious. “You’re letting the Germans take them?” Shosha asked.

  “It’s only for a short while,” the rabbi said. “They will even be filming their departure and arrival at the new children’s village.”

  “How can you do that?”

  “It’s all arranged.”

  Shosha grabbed the rabbi’s shoulders. “How can you be so stupid?” she said.

  “Shosha!” Rebekah said.

  “You saw what they did,” Shosha said to the rabbi. “You stood with me and you saw what they did.”

  Rebekah grabbed her daughter’s arm. “How dare you disrespect this man in my house.”

  “I know what I’m doing,” the rabbi said. He took Shosha’s hands from his shoulders. “I know what I’m doing.”

  He lowered her hands and went for the door. Leiozia walked with him and they opened the door together. The rabbi avoided Shosha’s eyes.

  “See you all at seven,” he said. “It should be fun.”

  SZTUKA HAD BECOME THE VENUE for the richest Jews and a few Catholic Poles who had ties with Rome and money. Low lights and smoke lent anonymity to recognizable faces the rabbi moved amid as an old friend. Shosha, Rebekah, and Leiozia arranged themselves and their boarders at a table near the stage. Uncorked wine, a bottle of old brandy, and cigarettes on a silver tray sat on the table.

  “I can take one?” asked Henryk.

  “I’m going to,” Leiozia said.

  Henryk picked up a cigarette and put it to his lips and picked out a long wooden match from a decorous arrangement in a squat brandy snifter. “This is fabulous,” he said and lit the cigarette.

  Shosha sat with her arms crossed. Leiozia smoked. Rebekah read the program, printed on paper made with rags and speckled with colored thread.

  On a happy farewell for Dr. Janusz Jerczek

  Founder of Our Children's Home

  We welcome this evening

  Distinguished Warsaw pianist Wladysla
w Szpilman

  Singer Andrzej Wlast, aka our own Waclaw Tajtelbaum

  Marja Ajzensztadt, “The Ghetto Nightingale”

  Rebekah thumbed through the program, and read the back two pages.

  Janusz Jerczek dreamed of becoming a doctor from his boyhood. He lost his father to illness as a child, worked through his youth saving money, and enrolled in medical school at age 18. In 1909, he started working with children at the hospital on Sliska Street. Dr. Jerczek considered himself a “scribe, writing the details of love and life on the souls and hearts of the children.” It was in this artistic frame of mind that he took control of the orphans’ shelter on Franciszkanska Street.

  A dry summary. Dr. Jerczek was a perfect clown, Rebekah thought, always throwing his hands around and exclaiming some new idea he had for the orphanage or “god damning” the occupiers and vowing never to die at their hands. He charted the progress of the most hopeless cases, the children with diseases or malformations that Rebekah just knew would never amount to any more than they already were. It made her sad sometimes, listening to the doctor’s optimism. She wanted to tell him to shut up and stop creating false hope. But as the weight of it would start to bear down on her, he’d end it all with a joke or some other silliness that would lift her and create more false hope, a momentary diversion that helped her forget. She read on.

  A patriot, Dr. Jerczek served as a military doctor in the Russo-Japanese War, and in the war that engulfed the world in 1914. He wrote a book entitled “Love and Learn: The Way to Bring Up a Child.” After he returned from the front, he lost his mother, with whom he was very close.

  Well, he wasn’t that close to her. After Jerczek’s father died, some kind of rift developed between mother and son, but Rebekah didn’t know the mother—Oza or Osa or Ocza (she tried to visualize the name in her mind). She would sometimes catch them arguing in the main hallway of Our Children’s Home over matters that, under the circumstances, could only be minor. When Jerczek stood over his mother’s body, Rebekah didn’t see him cry. His eyes looked hollow, she thought, the eyes of a stoic in a city of loss. He did make sure, however, that his mother was buried in the Jewish cemetery, with bribes in Swiss francs and handshakes and promises he couldn’t keep. His bio continued.

  Dr. Jerczek established two orphanages in Warsaw—one Jewish, Our Children's Home; and one Christian, The House of the Blessed Ones. With patience from Heaven, Dr. Jerczek did everything possible to ensure that his orphans' homes would house healthy and happy children. Dr. Jerczek welcomed children of every religion in Warsaw, and every capability—even mentally retarded or crippled in the legs. “We exist to give you the longing for a life which is not here, but will be one day,” Dr. Jerczek wrote. “A life of truth and justice that will lead you to G-d, fatherland, and Love.”

  “Fatherland” sounded too German to Rebekah. She would take it out.

  The house lights dimmed and a spotlight shown on the stage, a small round center for a few musicians, a piano, and a chanteuse. The rabbi walked through the audience and up two steps and took a microphone from a slender silver pole.

  “I would like to present,” the rabbi said, “the sweetest voice in all Warsaw, our own Marja Ajzensztadt, ‘the Nightingale.’”

  Terrific applause lifted the little bird above the smoke and she sang and that is all anyone would remember about the evening. Yes, Dr. Jerczek bowed and walked to the stage to tell people what he thought of them and goodbye. Yes, he said he would always remember their support and the great efforts they undertook—especially the rabbi—to secure his passage and the passages of the children out of Poland and out of the war. And yes, he was revered here as something of a saint in minor vestments.

  But the voice of this woman, this sweet, sweet voice, with its force and its purity and all the force that purity can exert in such a ruined and decimated place—this was a sound of beauty, this voice, this was the sound of truth.

  THE NEXT DAY, IN THE EARLY MORNING, Shosha left her house by the back door and took a carriage ride to the Jewish orphanage. She stepped off at a corner and walked the rest of the way and when she arrived, she saw the double front doors open. She hiked her skirt and mounted the steep brick steps. At the top, she paused. She was hungry, she was always hungry, and every effort loosed wavelets of fatigue. She had lost twenty pounds and was not a large woman before. When she took off her top garments, she no longer had to contract her diaphragm to see her ribs, which lay bare and malnourished, embarrassing protrusions that forced her to wear heavy clothes, even on warm days.

  She leaned against the railing and breathed. Fatigue roiled her stomach, like a grinding wheel sharpening a dull and chronic pain that wanted to waylay her. She rolled her head to stretch her neck. She looked around and noticed the windows on either side of the doors were open as high as they could be forced. She peered in.

  “Hello?” Her voice jarred the air.

  “Hello?” A hollow echo returned.

  She looked at the wood floor down the long center hall and the dark lights hanging from ceilings that were eighteen feet in all the passageways. She heard water, dripping in the cavern. She stepped in and heard her hard shoes echo on the black slate tiles in the entryway. She pushed a door and it stopped against the wall. She looked into a room. She walked into it—tap, tap, tap—on a hard painted floor and saw a long row of windows that looked out on an alley, and beneath the windows, a row of radiators connected by a thick pipe and a thin pipe that stopped at valves and stopcocks then turned and dove through round, coarse holes in the floor.

  She stood and stared. She thought about how she had wanted to speak with Jerczek last night, after the show, maybe stand outside with him, away from the others. But well-wishers surrounded him and she may have missed an opportunity by spending too much time in the lavatory with Leiozia, who was drunk.

  BY THE TIME LEIOZIA WAS ABLE TO WALK on her own, Dr. Jerczek was outside, standing in the street talking with his hands to Rebekah. Before Shosha could speak, Rebekah cut her off with a loud introduction and the doctor and Shosha joined hands. The doctor recalled the first time he had met Shosha and asked her why he hadn’t seen her in such a long time.

  “Oh, she’s been very busy helping Rabbi,” Rebekah said. She lowered her voice. “Keep this quiet, but the Jewish Combat Organization is working with the Underground on the other side of the wall and Shosha is a scout.”

  “Really?” the doctor said.

  “Yes, by Jiminy Jehoshaphat,” Leiozia grunted and laughed with her arms wrapped around Shosha’s tiny waist.

  “How long has Shosha been a scout?” Jerczek asked.

  “Long enough to pout.” Leiozia giggled and pouted.

  “Leiozia—mind your self,” Rebekah said.

  “It’s all right,” the doctor said. “I’m glad to hear all this. I wish I could be with you, and I would be, in other circumstances.”

  “They’re building a tunnel under the wall,” Rebekah whispered.

  “Mama—I wouldn’t say so much out here,” Shosha said. “Which train do you take?” she asked the doctor.

  “Szelna Station. We load in the morning.”

  “I wish you weren’t leaving,” Shosha said.

  “Trust Rabbi,” Rebekah said.

  “He is an amazing man,” Dr. Jerczek said. “I don’t know if he realizes the impact he has.”

  SHOSHA STOOD IN THE DUST AND SHADOWS and the silence struck her because she hadn’t heard true silence in a long time. She felt panicky, little strings of anxiety strummed in her belly. She couldn’t believe they had left so early. She thought “sunrise” when the doctor said he and the children were leaving in the morning, but they must have left in the wee hours, in the dark, for cover so the soldiers wouldn’t harass them.

  “IT’S WONDERFUL,” THE DOCTOR TOLD THEM about the new orphanage. “Just outside Vienna.”

  “I’ve seen the drawings,” Rebekah said. “Rabbi brought them by for my skeptical daughter.”

  “Skeptic
al?” the doctor said.

  As her legs weakened and sleepiness settled her inebriated fog, Leiozia tugged on Shosha. “We need to get her home,” Shosha said. She took the doctor’s cheek in her hand and pressed her cheek to it. “Shalom!” she said.

  “Shalom!”

  Rebekah took his hand. “Shalom beshaa muclachat.” Goodbye and good luck.

  The doctor kissed Leiozia’s cheek and she opened her eyes and smiled.

  SHOSHA WALKED OUT THE FRONT DOORS of the orphanage but turned around for a last look. “Shalom beshaa muclachat!” The words sounded hollow but she didn’t hear an echo this time.

  Eight

  Himmler repeated his demand all Jews be removed from Warsaw by year’s end. The Judenrat stepped up the daily quota of deportees. Himmler christened this final part of the Final Solution Operation Heydrich, in honor of Gestapo chief Reinhard Heydrich, now late. A Czech resistance fighter in Prague had thrown a bomb under Heydrich’s car on May 27. Heydrich died of his wounds on June 4, 1942. The ghetto resistance cited the death of Heydrich. “See, it can be done. They aren’t invincible.” Heydrich the murderer became Heydrich the inspiration. “Remember Heydrich!” was a wry war cry.

  Hitler wanted his troops to remember Heydrich for a different reason. “Since it is the opportunity which makes not only the thief but also the assassin,” Hitler said, “such heroic gestures as driving in an open, unarmored vehicle or walking about the streets unguarded are just damned stupidity, which serves the country not one wit. That a man as irreplaceable as Heydrich should expose himself to unnecessary danger, I can only condemn as stupid and idiotic.”

  Over the next two months, the Gestapo shrunk the ghetto by moving three major boundaries. A heinous stench squatted everywhere, and the fortunate few with perfume wrapped their faces with saturated scarves.