It Was That Night

by Rikke Barfod

  “The tanks and the Russians came. They opened the gates. First one, then another of us went outside. Was it a ruse? Was it safe to walk out? Nothing happened. I felt very brave when I limped out. Some of the others who were not too weak also walked out. Nobody stopped us.

  So, we walked. My feet hurt, it was cold. But I was free. We walked together in twos, threes, fours. Others joined us for a short while. We looked like a bunch of scarecrows, no flesh on our bones.

  One glorious afternoon full of warmth I found myself sitting in a field in Poland looking at my destroyed village. Why had I walked to Poland? Why was I sitting here? What had made me come? Maybe my feet remembered the way. They had walked it before. The other way. When I walked from Poland to Germany as a young lad. Everything came back.”

  He stops. His old man’s voice trembles. He drinks some water.

  “You know, when I was young my father forced me to work in his cobbler’s shop.” Jacov gives his cheerless laugh. “Which is why I left, hoping for something better. Funny, isn’t it? I survived the horrors, the ovens – all because I knew how to repair shoes.”

  His eyes take on a faraway look. “An army of boots,” he cackles, “..every day outside my door. To be polished and re-soled. Mostly leather boots. The officers liked their boots to shine. So something I detested saved my life. Hah!”

  He doesn’t speak for some time.

  “You won’t understand. Every day in the camp I had to remind myself I was Jacov Steinovitych. That Leah, Ursula and the baby were alive somewhere. One day I would see them again. One day I wouldn’t be cold anymore, one day I would not be hungry anymore. One day this living hell would end and human beings would be human again. Not animals like us – or degenerate villains like the capos and the officers.”

  I interrupt, “Didn’t you get enough food?”

  Jacov’s eyes hold something I don’t understand when he looks at me.

  “Food! A cupful of lukewarm water with a few sodden vegetables swimming around, a dried piece of stale bread. You didn’t die, but you didn’t get fat either.”

  I stare at him. I don’t understand. It can’t be possible.

  Jacov continues: “When I began walking I sort of forgot everything. One foot in front of the other; that filled a day. There was nothing else.”

  The pictures fight with each other in my head. They are so vivid. I see the boots and other things I don’t want to see. I hear myself making a horrified whimper. Mum takes my hand.

  She says: “If you survived it, Pappi, I guess we can survive hearing about it.”

  Jacov is silent again for a long time, looking at his past. His chair creaks when he speaks again.

  “When I remembered who I was and what I was looking for, I began walking towards Denmark. Can you believe it? I get to the Danish border and they won’t let me in. I couldn’t prove who I was. What the camp hadn’t done, this did. It destroyed me.”

  Mum draws in her breath loudly.

  “So, there I was. Couldn’t even remember your surname.” He looks at Isaac. “Tried to convince them we had lived in Denmark. But, of course, looking back, we must have been there illegally. I remembered that they only let us enter in 1938 because you had been hurt in Kristallnacht, Ursula. And of course, because your father sponsored us, Isaac.”

  He looks at me, pauses, “I forget you’re not Ursula. You look so much like her, you know.” His lips pucker. He bores his knuckles into his eyes. Mum takes his hand. I think it helps. Isaac too looks as if his tears are not far away. I don’t know what to do. Where to look. For a long time, I watch a bird in a tree outside the window. It’s polishing its feathers, twittering.

  After a while, Mum asks: “What did you do then?”

  “They gave me food and clothes – then turned to the next person in the queue. So I walked. That’s all one could do. There were many of us on the roads at that time. Several millions, I heard later. Sometimes you walked to-gether with another person. Shared a haystack. Then he might decide to turn left and you continued alone.”

  “But how did you eat?” Mum asks.

  “Whatever I found, what people gave. What I could dig out of the ground. Old turnips. Anything. Of course, these helped.” He pulls up his left sleeve and points at the numbers tattooed on his arm.

  I haven’t noticed the tattoo before. Suddenly I understand: Like farmer Christiansen does to his pigs. I feel sick. Wave after wave of nausea rolls through me. I hold my hands in front of my mouth and gulp. Mum gives me a glass of water.

  “Why should that help?” I stammer when I can control my voice.

  Jacov’s face contorts into a smile, “You know many people felt guilty – so they gave.”

  “But why should they feel guilty?” I ask.

  Jacov laughs his humourless laugh. “What do you think, Ursula?” They had passively stood by and seen us go through all these horrors. They were the ones who threw stones at our house, Ursula, and blinded you.”

  I don’t say that I am not Ursula. Mum gives my hand a hard squeeze.

  “What happened then?” she asks.

  “I reached Southern Germany and stayed at a nice farm. The woman on the farm was kind and let me stay a couple of days. To show my gratitude I repaired her shoes.”

  “Ach, bist du ein Schuhmacher?”

  “The horrors queued inside my head. She couldn’t know that I would forever hate shoes. But I said yes. The woman became quite excited.

  “Fritz, the village shoemaker, never came back. His shop is still there, maybe you can … I’ll find out,” she said.

  “So, I settled in the cobbler’s shop. I called myself Jacob Stein. The days passed. I said hello when people said hello to me. I repaired their shoes and sometimes their furniture. I felt like a mechanical toy. Ursula had a little mechanical man. She liked it a lot.”

  Again his eyes take on that faraway look some people have when they’re trying to work out a difficult sum.

  “I tried the Red Cross again to find Leah and the children, but nobody knew anything, since we hadn’t been registered in Denmark, and I still couldn’t remember Ruben’s surname.”

  A long pause. The only sound was a bluebottle at the window desperate to get out.

  “Sometimes I dreamed of Ursula calling me. You know every time somebody said the name Ursula, I ... It was never her ... I survived ... Felt like a moving empty shell. Still do, actually. I kept to myself. Years went by, until I went to a neighbouring town to get supplies for the shop. I was crossing the road and a car struck me.”

  “Oh no,” Mum gasps.

  “It wasn’t too bad. The man in the car stopped and came running to apologize. After having helped me up and ascertained I wasn’t hurt, he kept peering at me in a strange way.”

  “Jacov. Is that you? Wunderbar!” The man embraced me. I shied away from him. I didn’t know him.

  “Who are you?” I asked

  “Don’t you know me, old friend? I’m Heinz! I’ve been trying for years to find you. This is a joyful occasion indeed. Where are the others?”

  “Others?”

  “Leah and Ursula, of course.”

  “When he talked, I did recognize him. He looked older. So did I, I guess. He still had that doctor air about him. The bustling, let-me-help-attitude. I told him I hadn’t been able to find Leah and the children – and that the authorities would not let me back into Denmark. I couldn’t prove I had lived there before. And what was the name of that doctor who married Hannah? ‘Birnstein.’ Ach ja. A corridor in my memory got unlocked, together with the many doors that let from it. Kronprinsessegade- that’s where we had lived.

  Too late now. Useless information.”

  Chapter 33

  Jacov

  Heidelberg

  Tuesday 19th April 1983

  “Heinz took over. He can be very forceful you know. Comes from making decisions about patients, I guess. I didn’t really want to leave the hard-earned no-man’s land inside. Didn’t want to be involved or feel.
But Heinz insisted.

  “Jacov, you must come with me. I will help you get everything sorted out.”

  “But I live here. I repair shoes.”

  Heinz looked astounded. “Jacov, you know you hate shoes. Come with me.”

  So, I found myself taken to Heidelberg and installed in a house. The second day I went out shopping I met one of my former neighbours in the street. The blacksmith, Wilhelm’s father. He didn’t recognize me. I fell into a black abyss. How I got back to the house I don’t know. When Heinz came, I just sat, staring in to space. I told him:

  “I can’t live here. They are still here, the people who blinded Ursula. I’d better go back to that village.”

  Heinz reminded me again how much I hated repairing shoes. He found me this place instead. He blamed himself for not thinking about the consequences of letting me live so near my old house. I should never have come back. My house, my shop, it’s all gone.

  The days became longer. My thoughts were like a dog chasing his tail. If only I had left when Morten phoned me at work.”

  Jacov sits without talking. Then he says the words that really hit me:

  “Can you imagine what it is to exist – and have nothing to live for? Trying to forget the past that crowds you every day in so many different ways. Be it a melody playing on the radio. A memory of a newborn baby. Ursula’s first words. The good smell of Leah’s cooking. All the things that represent a normal person’s life.”

  Jacov looks at us.

  “Sounds horrible, doesn’t it? Amazing what human beings can do to each other.”

  “Do you hate the Germans, then?” I ask. I can’t really understand why he is still here, when he could have gone to Israel.

  “I don’t think about it that way,” a half-smile creeps out through his skin, the corner of one side of his mouth turns up. There’s a sparkle in his eyes when he says, “I think I’ve sort of given up on humans. I like birds and dogs better – and butterflies.” His eyes twinkle. “And making something useful with my hands, as long as I don’t have to repair shoes or shine boots.”

  I realize there is more to this new grandfather of mine than meets the eye. Suddenly he isn’t just a pathetic old man, who has survived something nobody should ever have to experience.

  Jacov smiles, a truly lovely smile, “Now when I see you all I don’t feel quite so empty anymore.”

  “What kept you going?” Mum asks.

  “I don’t know. Maybe hearing Ursula in my head, calling. I did get close to ending it all. The day I received the compensation cheque.”

  Mum hunches forward. I ask: “What was that?”

  “The German State compensated for having put Jews in concentration camps and killing our families, for stealing our houses – or something like that,” he says brutally.

  “But, but ...” I stammer.

  “Exactly. So, I decided to end it all. Enough was enough. I had the rope. It hung down from a strong beam in the shed. And then this interfering Heinz came by. He persuaded me to go on, in the hope that I might yet hear from Ursula.”

  Heinz has arrived without us noticing. We all give a start when he suddenly talks:

  “I am really glad that I came that time to tell you some very good news which I didn’t think should wait.”

  “What was the news?” Mum asks.

  Heinz rubs his hands together, “That Simon Wiesenthal had found Eichmann.”

  “It was the best piece of news I had heard in years. Later he found many more. I don’t know if he tracked down the bastards from Theresienstadt.”

  Jacov falls silent.

  “Who were Eichmann and Simon Wiesenthal?” I ask.

  “I think it says something about them in the book Kirsten lent you. Simon Wiesenthal survived an extermination camp.”

  “Just like me,” Jacov brays. “He knew how to paint. I knew shoes. The thing I hated most in the world. My father was a cobbler. He taught me.”

  “After the war Wiesenthal used all his efforts to catch Nazi criminals,” Mum continues. “Eichmann was the most notorious. He was the one who organized the extermination camps. Wiesenthal found him in 1960, in Argentina.”

  “What then?”

  “Well, he went to trial. Later he was hanged.” Jacov spits.

  Isaac leans forward and asks, “What did you do with the cheque?”

  “I took it and used it for a good cause,” Heinz answers.

  “After some years Heinz asked me if it wouldn’t be a good idea to try the Red Cross to see if they could find Ruben and Hannah.

  “Why not.”

  The Red Cross found them in Israel. Heinz wrote to them. Suddenly they were here. I was so very happy to see them, but when I asked:

  “Where is Leah and Ursula, and the baby?” Hannah burst into tears and told me that Leah was dead and that Ursula had disappeared during the escape.

  I didn’t think my world could disintegrate thrice. It did. I screamed at them to get out. Apparently I was so furious that they did not have a chance to tell me that you had survived.” Jacov looks at Mum as if he has just been given all the riches in the world. “When Heinz looked in later, I didn’t want to see him.”

  “Why did you bring them? They only thought about themselves. They couldn’t even take care of a pregnant woman and a blind girl.”

  From Jacov’s head disconnected pictures swirl of a man and a woman who try to say something and then are running from the house.

  Jacov continues, “And now you are here.” He smiles at me. “There should be a photograph.”

  He gets to his feet and lumbers into the living room. We hear him rummage through things, muttering to himself. When he comes back, he has a photograph in his hand. He gives it to Mum.

  “Here! Heinz gave me this.”

  The photograph shows a family all stilted like in all old photographs. A father, a mother and a tiny baby. Mum sits quietly, holding the picture.

  “It’s like seeing myself in the mirror,” she says as she gazes yearningly at Leah’s picture. “To think this is my mother.” The tears that are never far away in this house start rolling down her cheeks. “I wish I had known her. Later, you must tell me all about her,” she says to Jacov.

  I suddenly feel tired all the way in to my bones. And old. Being able to see ghosts has led to this. In one way I wish I had never seen Ursula, but then ... And something nice has happened, apart from Mum finding her father and everything, I am not being treated like a kid any more. I walk outside and sit on the bench.

  Mum comes out and sits down beside me. I put my head on her lap, although I am really too big for that kind of thing. Mum holds me.

  She sighs. “Wars never end.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “How many people do you think still bear scars from having been in a concentration camp?”

  “I never thought about it. You mean like the numbers on his arm?”

  A rose petal falls onto the bench. Mum takes it and rubs it. “That too. How do you think people feel inside?”

  I sit up. “I don’t know. It must be horrible. I think I would hate everybody, if somebody had done that to me. Mum, how can people do that to other people?”

  Mum doesn’t answer straight away. Then she says, “They are still doing it, you know. Wars are still going on. You know the Russians have invaded Afghanistan. And think of the apartheid in South Africa. And it was not only the people in the concentration camps that suffered. Some people were forced to do the dirty job of killing. How do you think they feel now?”

  I’ve never heard Mum talk like this.

  “But.. But that’s all wrong! That’s .... Mum, the whole thing is so scary. Do you like him, your father?”

  “I have a feeling for him. I know we’re connected. And I pity him. But I would like to know him better. I do hope he decides to come back with us.” Mum stares at the rose petal.

  I look down and say, “Mum, he is a bit gross the way he shovels food into his mouth.”

  Mu
m smiles. “Have you thought about why he does that?”

  “Erm?”

  “Don’t you think he learned that in the concentration camp where they never got enough food? The little you got you had to eat fast, before someone snatched it from you.”

  “But still …”

  Mum’s smile gets wider, “I know. I just hope I’ll never end up like that.”

  I sit upright and stare at her: “Why should you?”

  Mum’s fingers shred the rose petal.

  “Well, you know Granny sometimes gets confused. That’s what happens when you get old.”

  “Well she doesn’t spill her food on her clothes.”

  Mum grins. “Why do you think she always wears an apron?”

  Jacov and Isaac come out. “Here you are,” Isaac says. “What about a cup of coffee, Sarah? I could do with a drink.”

  “Before I make the coffee, I need to ask you again: Pappi, can you not come with us to the house? It is the only place we know here in Germany, where we have a chance of seeing Ursula.”

  I get scared and hide behind Mum, when Jacov starts shouting and screaming. In the midst of his shouting he collapses on the bench, coughing and crying.

  Mum takes his hand. “It is fine. I should not have asked you. But will you then come with us to Denmark? It is the only other place we know where Ursula appears.”

  Jacov does not answer. He slowly calms down. Mum goes inside to make coffee.

  After the coffee, my grandfather takes down a violin from the wall and begins playing. The notes screech like angry cats, then they murmur like waves lapping at stones.

  In the end they sound like heartbeats. It is like hearing someone’s feelings. My tears start falling again.

  At one point I fall asleep and wake up, when Mum carries me out to the car.

  Chapter 34

  Claire

  Heidelberg

  Sunday, 24th April 1983

  After many days and much persuasion Jacov reluctantly comes with us to Heidelberg. He stays with Doctor Heinz. Mum has phoned her job and my school and told them we’re held up, and will be back a bit later. She also phones her mum and dad. I don’t know what she says to them. Afterwards she looks like someone’s just eaten her last piece of chocolate.