By a miracle this unexpected air attack didn’t claim any victims, but passengers and mobilized men alike, going toward their military units, split into groups and dispersed in the panic caused by the next wave of low-flying airplanes, which left in their wake, beyond the forest horizon, a series of subsequent explosions—military ammunition dumps were hit, gasoline storage units or something like that.
To this day I don’t know and I probably never will whether those call-up slips, tied only to rumors that were spread around even quite deliberately as misinformation about impending military operations in the Far East, were not simply dust in the blue eyes of the Germans and thus a discreet form of mobilization, in which case Hitler had just seized the day. Were the Soviet authorities really caught with their pants down and completely surprised by the German invasion? Or had they put themselves to sleep with the boisterous declarations of TASS that everything is fine, Madame La Marquise? I don’t know, but if the latter is true, and as I remember how the German tanks, airplanes, and storm troopers penetrated the defenseless, unprepared Soviet land like a hot knife in a lump of butter, I ask myself: how did they not know in the Kremlin and not anticipate what was known or felt by our good old men in Kolodetz, while they were winding and unwinding the ball of yarn of the Rothschild family problems?
I don’t rule out the possibility of their knowing it, because, as it became clear much later, they had been warned by our man Sorge in Tokyo, and by our intelligence guys in Berlin, and by a high-ranking Bulgarian general, who was shot because he told them even the exact day and time of the attack. In this case, was Stalin expecting in a most idiotic fashion that up until the very last moment his pal Adolf would have second thoughts and finally fulfill the threat, desired by both Germans and Russians alike, that he would swoop down on England? Exactly the same way, that four years later, this one and the same Adolf expected and believed, as Russian bombs were exploding above his own bunker in Berlin, that the Anglo-Americans would swoop down on Russia and he’d get off with a mere fine for illegally parking tanks at inappropriate places abroad?
If I’m not mistaken, I’ve gone slightly off the track, but now I’ll go straight back to the burning wheat.
The panic and confusion that seized the whole area were indescribable and my memory has retained just scraps of a nightmare dream, fragments from a picture torn into small pieces, in which you can’t tell anymore which is which, or what’s up and what’s down. Only one thing was clear to us—we had to reach Lvov at any cost and it was thanks only to Rabbi Ben-David, who didn’t lose his presence of mind, that we managed to remain uninjured from the fire storm that was wrapping us in black sooty smoke and devouring wheat and villages. In front of us on the dusty torn-up roads the first streams of refugees flowed in, striving eastward and always eastward, while in the opposite direction there were already military columns of infantry, horse carts, and cavalry; endless, endless lines of volunteers—still in civilian clothes and barely equipped, or old beat-up kolhoz trucks, packed with badly dressed defenders of the fatherland, often even without a uniform, and only a red band on their sleeves. There was no music, no marching, not even the song of the three tank men—those three jolly fellows; people were going to battle silent, intent, and solemn. From the refugees we would learn of rumors that clashed and contradicted each other: that our boys were heading toward Warsaw, that the Germans were just in front of Kiev, or that whole German divisions had surrendered because of that same old delusion of ours that the proletariat of all nations, which every morning would unite around the headlines of the newspaper Pravda, wouldn’t raise its hand against the worker-peasant Soviet Union. In any case, the rumors were mostly favorable—you can imagine that at such a moment people are ready to believe in even the most incredible but longed-for lie, rather than the bitter truth.
Our group fell apart once and for all and melted into that chaos. My good rabbi and I spent the night in some deserted hut, probably for the field guard, which was like a quote from another peacetime song, because in the field the pumpkins were still blooming, carefree with their big bright yellow flowers. The night was full of amorous grasshoppers, fireflies that were winking coquettishly, and in the distance, every now and then, the echoes of sharp bursts of machine-gun fire—so far away, as if in the forest a woodpecker were hard at work. The rabbi disappeared and about an hour later came back with a big slice of brown village bread and a chunk of cheese. It seems strange to me now that I didn’t even ask him where he got it from; in that nightmarish unreality I wouldn’t have been surprised if he had come back on a motorcycle, wearing his rabbinic Passover outfit or, say, the uniform of a red politcommissar from the tank divisions. Exhausted, he threw himself on the mat of woven willow shoots, covered pitifully with a torn Ukrainian rug, and silently gave me the food. And I, the fool, hungrily bit into the bread and the cheese, without even asking what bushes, thorns, and barbed wire had torn his clothes and scratched his arms. But even if I’d asked, what would have been the use? This reminds me of Abramovitch, who came back home after a tiresome journey and got upset with his wife, while he was examining the blisters on his feet.
“You didn’t even ask how I was!”
“Oh, well,” said his wife. “How are you?”
“Oy, oy, don’t ask!”
TEN
Sometimes on army transport carts, more rarely on military trucks, and mostly on foot along the dusty roads between villages, exhausted to the very limits of our strength, we finally dragged ourselves to Lvov. It was evening but there were no streetlights, the city was roaring with explosions, in the north the sky was red with fire. Soviet soldiers were running toward some destination, dragging a heavy machine gun, two nurses were bandaging the side of the head of a chap wounded by burning pieces of oil-soaked cloth, which were emitting more smoke than light. Nobody even answered our question about what exactly was happening in the town.
It wasn’t necessary to convince ourselves that at this time of night, our only option was to get somehow to my sister and her assistant pharmacist, where maybe Schura and Susannah were still to be found—the naive romantics, who came all the way from Kolodetz to watch Othello and listen to Rachmaninov, without even realizing that a slightly different performance would be presented to them.
We passed turned-over and incinerated streetcars, wrapped in their own wires, by the side of a still smoking automobile with its four doors wide open, which turned out to be, who knows how, in the middle of a fountain. And right in the middle of the boulevard we saw, as if ready for a grand concert, a Petrov piano, which people who were running away must have wanted to take with them but along the way had thought twice about. In the high school yard the cement cast of Lenin, with a thumb stuck under his vest, and his other hand pointing toward the bright future, was overturned, and even the hand pointing to the above-mentioned bright future was partially broken and from the inside iron rods quite prosaically peeped out, and from the depths of a rampaged and burnt shoe shop, a crazy telephone was ringing constantly. Such a picture it was, dear brother, of devastation and panicked flight, which—I imagine—was probably described in the TASS communiqués as a “planned and organized evacuation of the population,” and by Radio Berlin as an “indescribably enthusiastic welcoming of the liberating German troops.”
On a side street close to us again three young soldiers came running up with a machine gun, set it down on the pavement, and hit the ground in anticipation, and I, in a most friendly manner, hailed them in Russian: “Hello, comrades!”
The soldiers didn’t even reply, and I was just about to ask them about the situation and this and that, when my rabbi squeezed my arm above the elbow till it hurt and dragged me in the other direction.
“Idiot!” he hissed. “Don’t you realize they’re Germans?”
How could I have figured it out in the darkness, and moreover, at the movies I had seen mostly what the Japanese samurai looked like, and not German soldie
rs. We went away fast, but behind our back someone shouted in Russian-German: “Hey, Russki, halt! Stop! Stop!”
Behind us, nailed shoes started heavily stomping, and we stopped, without daring to turn around—in expectation of a shot in the back. It didn’t come, though, the sinister shot, and the soldier, who caught up with us running, asked, breathing heavily, “Do you have matches? Matches!”
And for greater clarity he struck the fingers of his hand against the index finger of his other hand.
The rabbi reached into his pocket and handed him a box of matches, and with an almost salon-like politeness, quite uncustomary for our Kolodetz, said, “Bitte, mein Herr!”
It seemed to me that his hand was shaking slightly, but the boy turned out to have been well brought up, because he said a kind “Danke!” and clumsily ran up to his chaps, who for some unknown reason were lying on the ground, with—keep in mind—dead silence reigning all about them. I don’t know exactly, but I think this was the first and last time during the Second World War that a representative of Hitler’s victorious Wehrmacht and a rabbi had such a polite and cordial exchange.
We finally reached the old apartment building in which my people were living, and went up the dark stairway with difficulty, as we didn’t even have matches anymore to get to the right floor and the right entrance. But one way or another, I managed to feel my way around, since the buzzer, of course, wasn’t working—it had gone silent for a long time now and, if I remember correctly, during the whole of the Soviet period of their life, the Krantz family had been waiting for the technician who was supposed to fix it and who was apparently not going to show up until the complete triumph of communism.
We had been knocking on the door for a long time when we were flooded by some kind of yellowish light. The door of the neighboring apartment opened, a man at the threshold lifted, high above his head, a gas lamp that was flashing in his eyes, and only after taking a good look at us did he ask, “Who are you looking for, gentlemen?”
I immediately noticed the word “gentlemen,” which was so foreign to Soviet life that it had the effect of a phrase out of a Chekhov play. This is how we learned that Mr. Assistant-Pharmacist Krantz had been mobilized, my sister evacuated with the polyclinic in which she was working as an attendant, and as far as my Komsomol youths were concerned, “the young sir and the young lady,” who had been visiting here, they had enlisted, as far as he knew, as volunteers on the very first day of the war.
We stood silent in the corridor in front of the ruins of our last hope of finding a connection with our people, while the neighbor, who again lifted the lamp to take a look at us, asked, “And who are you?”
And there we were, sitting in the big guestroom, the kind with high plaster ceilings, furnished with magnificent antique pieces built during the lavish Austro-Hungarian times. I secretly spotted the Catholic cross in the niche on the wall and the porcelain figure of the Madonna under it.
“You probably come from afar?” asked the host.
It didn’t take us long to explain what had happened on our long road to Manchuria, because in the yellow light of the lamp from the big mirror across from us, two disheveled, dusty and quite suspicious characters were staring back at us, while—let me tell you this too—our host, with his checkered dressing gown, smoothly combed silver hair, which had once been bright blond, and high pale forehead, briefly suggested the air of a Polish aristocrat from an old genealogical tree, who had somehow and unknowingly survived under the blows of the revolutionary axes.
“And you must be hungry?” he asked, still so politely.
The rabbi and I looked at each other, I was ready to mumble some lie of the “Thanks, please don’t bother” variety, which was written in the unwritten code of good conduct for the residents of Kolodetz by Drogobych, but Rabbi Ben-David nodded with a sincere readiness. “Yes, very. I think we haven’t eaten since yesterday.”
In this way we got eggs sunnyside up and sausage, while our host observed us with unconcealed curiosity. “You’re Jews, right? If the family Krantz are your relatives.”
I nodded and after I swallowed my food, I asked in turn, “And you’re Polish?”
He smiled. “Is it obvious by my accent? Polish, professor of ophthalmology in the local polyclinic. My wife is also a doctor, now she is at a graduate course in Leningrad and only God knows how and when we’ll be together again…. And what are your plans? I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be excessively curious, but if we judge by the German radio stations, Lvov is already behind the front line and by tomorrow the resistance of your people in the city will be crushed.”
My signal system picked up that “your people,” which is why I cast a glance at the rabbi, when the host invited us to stay the night with him. I didn’t know if it was reckless of my good rabbi, but he quite enthusiastically accepted. And I, admittedly, wasn’t sure that this, so to speak, foreign element, wouldn’t open the window and call the German soldiers down below—those fellows who owed us a box of matches. Quite soon I had an opportunity to confirm again that Rabbi Ben-David had a healthy instinct about decent people that was seriously different from the class notions of the comrades from the Center, because this pale professor-ophthalmologist turned out to be to an equal degree a decent and noble anti-communist, with a barely perceptible Polish streak of anti-Semitism—something like a good aged wine with a bitter aftertaste.
A big discussion around dinner, which we quickly polished off, didn’t happen because we were dead tired and the pan ophthalmologist accommodated us in the servants’ long-unused room—a dear memory from different times.
We slept like logs and in the morning, thoroughly washed, clean-shaven and reeking of Soviet “Troinoi” eau de cologne, which we discovered in the bathroom, from our host in his checkered dressing gown we received magnificent tea with toast and butter. He even apologized for not having milk: he had gone out early in the morning, but the milk shop was closed. Can you imagine—our motherland is burning, millions are being displaced here, there and everywhere, and Mr. Doctor is apologizing that the milk shop at the corner is not performing its duties to the community! We were having breakfast in the kitchen, with the copper pans hanging above the stove and the white-blue ceramic tiles, which featured Dutch women with wooden shoes and windmills. The host was again observing us with curiosity, as if he had never seen Galician Jews.
“And you intend to report yourselves to the military unit and to go and defend the Soviet regime?” he asked unexpectedly.
“Yes,” said the rabbi mildly.
“What is your profession? Excuse my curiosity.”
“Rabbi,” said the rabbi mildly.
The professor choked on his tea, and again, but more quietly, asked, “And you intend to fight for the Soviet regime?”
“Yes. And now we intend—if God helps us—to get to our people.”
“To your people, yes…,” the professor repeated uselessly, and on a sudden interest turned to me: “And you?”
Well, what about me? While the rabbi went out to the balcony for a smoke, upon my weak shoulders fell the effort to explain the whole Jewish puzzle of kinship relations between me and the rabbi, the young man and the young lady who had gone as volunteers to the Red Army, and last but not least, their mother, the rabbi’s sister and, as they say in the trade union reports, contemporaneously my wife Sarah, who at this moment was at the mineral baths somewhere in Rovno, because of some kidney trouble. Brief and clear. Not that are absent those types of kinship relations with the Poles, but with the Jews kinship entangles itself in such a pathological knot of umbilical cords, interdependencies, and affinities, that by comparison the Oedipus complex is a hardly noticeable mental quirk—something like a twitch of the eyelid. The case becomes even more complicated by the fact that all Jews, literally all of them—starting with the sunflower seed vendor Golda Zilber all the way to Baron Rothschild, are relatives on their father’s
side, I mean by that rib of Adam’s, which started that whole family scourge.
I remained with the impression that my genealogical vignettes, starting from the next door apartment of the assistant pharmacist Shabtsi Krantz and reaching all the way to the mineral baths by Rovno, the professor let pass by his ears with boredom, because he interrupted me in a businesslike manner: “Did you say Rovno?”
I nodded silently. He looked at me with his transparent blue eyes, kept silent for a while, and only after that said, “Rovno as of yesterday is in the hands of the Germans. I’m sorry.”
At that moment the whole carefully constructed kinship pyramid collapsed upon me, the whole world of Adam and Abraham with concern for all relatives collapsed—from Rothschild to Golda Zilber and Albert Einstein. Only Sarah remained, who was silently looking at me with her grayish-green eyes. Sarah, oh, my God, I forced her to go there! I had to reach her, I had to reach that unfamiliar place somewhere around Rovno and take her out of there—despite everything, despite all armies, divisions, and the SS Stormtroopers of Schickelgruber!
Of course, this was my first and immediate aspiration. But it didn’t take any special effort on the part of my rabbi to convince me of the hopelessness of the idea of penetrating Nazi-occupied territory in order to discover a sanatorium somewhere around Rovno. My only hope, which the rabbi raised in me, was the possibility that the patients had been evacuated in a timely fashion to the interior of the country. Then the problem was transferred from Sarah to us, who had turned out to be such fools as to mix up the road for the Far East and on our own fallen into the trap of the near West.
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