Speaking of traps, I remember that the professor brought in from the street a leaflet in three languages—German, Ukrainian, and Polish—in which it was proclaimed that thanks to the victorious German military power, our dream had come true—Lvov and the region had been liberated from Bolshevik oppression and annexed to the Eastern Territories of the Reich. In addition, we were politely informed that during a three-day period all communist functionaries, Jews, and Soviet officers in hiding were supposed to register at command headquarters, or else, according to wartime rules, they were going to be…. Well, shall I tell you, or can you guess yourself?
“Lvov and the region!” Did this mean as well our little town of Kolodetz by Drogobych, my old parents and the permanent sanhedrin from our workshop, my dear neighbors and acquaintances—Ukrainians, Poles, and Jews, including David Leibovitch’s café, with the orphaned Atheists’ Club and the once-upon-a-time ardent believers in Jewish social-democracy?
And so, my dear brother and my unknown reader, my motherland was changed for the fourth time and now I was solemnly joined to the big German family, but with one detail, which spoiled the holiday a little: as a person of Jewish origin I was supposed to register myself during a three-day period at command headquarters, and I really doubt that the reason behind it was to create an opportunity for me to be given congratulatory telegrams and flowers.
“I don’t know what I can advise you,” our professor said, quite concerned. “I deal with myopic eyes and not with myopic social utopias, and that’s why I have no sympathy either for the Russians or for their Soviet authority. I have to admit, and please don’t be offended, but I don’t feel any particular tenderness for the Jews either, especially for all your different Karl Marxes, Rosa Luxemburgs, Leon Trotskys, or tutti quanti Kaganoviches, who dead or alive are seriously responsible for our present-day troubles.”
Rabbi Ben-David wanted to say something in disagreement, but the professor raised his hand. “Please, I have no desire whatsoever to start a political debate. But since I, as a Pole, can’t stand the Germans any more than you can, and especially these present-day ones, I don’t see any other way out for you but to sneak somehow east, and go to those whom you call ‘yours.’ ”
“This is what we intend to do,” the rabbi said calmly.
The professor was silent for a while, then moved his pensive glance from the rabbi to me and finally said, “I still don’t understand, I honestly don’t understand what connects you to this idea, when you know what outrages are being committed in Soviet Russia. Or don’t you know? Haven’t you even heard?”
The rabbi smiled sadly. “A very dear person, maybe the dearest person, a woman, is now in the steel grip of what you call ‘outrages.’ I don’t even know if she’s alive or if she’ll be alive much longer. And still, I will fight to defend the Soviet country from fascism. This is a different question, it’s hard for me even to explain it to you. And you, I dare say, are confusing the idea with the system and this is welcome to the system. It likes to be confused with the idea, and even to be perceived as its only materialized expression, equivalence, and interchangeable equal. How can I make myself clear? As far as I understand, you are a believing Christian, and does the Christian church not want to be identified with Christianity? But the Idea is one thing, and the System that has to materialize it, another. And a day comes when the defense of the Christian ideal of brotherhood, love of one’s neighbor, and forgiveness for all, is taken up by the Inquisition, the Crusades, and the technologies for burning witches and chasing the devil. The spiritual glamour of your Christian idea is imperceptibly replaced by the glamour of church ritual, and the asceticism and personal dedication of the early Christians by the gluttony and lechery of abbots and cardinals. Isn’t it so? The system has its own survival needs and logic, and if the Idea stands up to them, so much the worse for it—it can be silently buried and replaced by an exact copy or a demonstration model. But you remain true to the original idea, regardless of everything. You can deal with myopic vision, but are powerless in front of color-blindness. And exactly there lies the zone where the Idea and the System blend so tightly that you don’t know which one you are serving: the ideas of Christ or the canons of the church.”
If the rabbi had finished with an “Amen and Gut Shabbos!” this would have been one of his usual Shabbos sermons on questions of life and the universe.
The professor laughed soundlessly. “So you consider me to be politically color-blind?”
“I think you’re an honest person, who isn’t obliged to carry someone else’s cross in the name of someone else’s ideas. Everyone crosses his own Desert, in search of his own Canaan! In any case, you said something about the Jews, Marx, and responsibility. Let me remind you that Karl Marx was not a Marxist, nor was Christ a Christian. Ideas are the children of their time and these two, as well as the apostle Paul, Baruch Spinoza, or Sigmund Freud, are to blame neither for the distortion of their ideas nor for the fact that they were born Jewish. By the way, Hitler and Stalin, and the great inquisitor Torquemada, are not Jews, but this doesn’t change anything!”
That same evening the professor brought two old Polish identity papers and with shyness admitted that he had stolen them from the clinic’s archives. To me fell the identity documents of one Heinrich Bjegalski, known in the clinic as the doorman Pan Heniek, who died of a stroke sometime before the Soviet era, and the rabbi became neither more nor less than the chief—the head intern Karel Miechkowski—who went to his mother’s funeral in Gdansk and forgot to come back. I resembled the porter Pan Heniek in the glued photograph as much as poor Avramchik resembled Ramon Navarro and the difference could be noticed even by the blind Yossel. I expressed my concern, but the professor said:
“Don’t worry, Mr. Blumenfeld. For the bureaucrat, especially the German bureaucrat, it is important to have a number, a photo, and a stamp. Here is the number, here is the stamp, and do your best to keep them from noticing the difference between the photo and you.”
“Your photo, see, was taken before you had typhoid and viral encephalitis!” the rabbi added nervously.
So here we are—two Polish citizens, liberated from the Soviet oppression, who are strolling through the streets of Lvov, looking for some address, which, according to the words of Rabbi Karel Miechkowski, was the former secret meeting place for Esther Katz. There, according to the hopes of the rabbi, we could get in touch and so on.
I tried to walk calmly and nonchalantly, and looked bravely into the eyes of the frequent German patrol pairs with dogs, who, as it seemed to me, regarded us intently and with suspicion. Sometimes I even gave them a friendly nod.
Just like Mendel, who told his friend, “Yesterday the ticket inspector came into the tram, and can you imagine, he looked at me as if I didn’t have a ticket.”
“And what did you do?”
“I looked at him as if I had a ticket!”
And so, we were walking around, looking at the numbers of the houses, till at one point my rabbi said, “Wait here and don’t move.”
And he crossed the street and dived into the entrance of a building.
And right at this moment in the narrative, something happened that defined my destiny for years ahead. Or as some authors would say—there was a dramatic turn of events.
This dramatic turn consisted in the sudden appearance, as if from somewhere deep below the ground, of trucks with soldiers. The soldiers jumped out and in no time made a thick circle around us, the peaceful civilians. There was sudden panic, the German shepherds were barking viciously, tugging on their leather leashes, and the soldiers were pushing us with the butts of their carbines toward the trucks: “Los, los, los…”
In confusion, I pulled out the—as it seemed to me—saving identity documents of Pan Heniek, and since, as you know, the German language isn’t foreign to me, and I had been all the way to Vienna, I announced to the German officer that people were waiting f
or me in the ophthalmology office and other such nonsense, and he only pushed me a little more with his butt to make me get on faster.
The last thing I saw when the trucks were pulling away was my rabbi Shmuel Ben-David, who had come out into the street. He was pale as a porcelain figurine of the Madonna, and when the truck passed him by, he lowered his eyelids, perhaps as a sign of courage, or perhaps as a last good-bye.
It turned out that my underground life under someone else’s name in Lvov lasted less than the life of a one-day fly, and the man who is destined by Yahweh to have things happen to him—well, he cannot escape them. This is a proven fact.
It was only when they crammed us into the trucks, littered with dirty, stinking straw, that I could hear from the small barred vent the conversation between the invisible engine drivers and understand that our route was through Warsaw for Berlin, can you imagine?
So, this is how, my dear brother, myself and another 399 citizens of Lvov, courteously situated over the straw of ten horse wagons, were sent on a business trip to Berlin, the heart of our new motherland—the German Reich—designated in the school-books, or, according to the historically proven hypothesis, the Third, or Thousand-Year.
ISAAC’S FOURTH BOOK
“To Each His Own,” or to the Concentration Camps, with Love
ONE
In our Kolodetz they used to tell this story about three Jews from different parts of Galicia, who by the will of fate, during a certain historic period called “Soviet Power,” happened to be together in the same prison cell, before they were sent off to the faraway Siberian camps, each according to his own crime.
“I’ve been sentenced to fifteen years,” said one by way of introduction, “because I was for Moishe Liebermann.”
“I too got fifteen years,” the second one said, “because I was against Moishe Liebermann.”
And the third one said, “They also gave me fifteen years, because I am Moishe Liebermann.”
I’m not making a direct comparison, God forbid, but in the horse wagons, on the damp, dirty straw, they had crammed all of us together—the supporters of Soviet power, the opponents of Soviet power, and this same power itself in the persons of the honest Soviet workers from institutions and factories, who happened to be exactly in the wrong place at exactly the wrong time, as you recall. Not one of us could say why we were captured like rabbits in the streets of Lvov, what we were guilty of or whether we were guilty at all, and—most importantly—where they were taking us. The hypotheses of the sharper minds, in whose number I in no way dared to include myself, were quite controversial and in reality unconfirmed, because the war was, so to speak, still quite new and Europe was just beginning to accumulate rich and fruitful experience. According to some we were being packed off so that we could be exchanged for German hostages, which to me seemed not very plausible, because the Germans already had in their possession a much richer assortment for barter in the form of complete military units already taken prisoner, including here and there a supply of nice fat decorated officers. According to others we were traveling to the interior parts of our new motherland in order to replace mobilized specialists from different areas of German life. This was more probable, even though I don’t believe that in Berlin, or say Baden-Baden, they had a deficit of tailors skilled in turning old Jewish caftans inside out.
One way or the other, the road turned out to be quite long—I don’t remember anymore, five or six days and nights, during which they threw at us only some bread or boiled potatoes in homeopathic rations, which would make even a family of cockroaches have spontaneous dystrophy. And as to certain physiological details, please, spare me the memories!
The train moved slowly. At some places, probably railroad junctions, our boxcars would jolt along back and forth for hours, we could hear railroad mechanics’ whistles, cries, the barking of dogs, and at one place we even had music blaring out from a brass band—they were welcoming or seeing someone off, but it was hardly in our honor.
Lying on the straw, I was thinking with concern and tenderness about everyone and everything—about Sarah and the children, so abruptly taken by the whirlwind of war, about my father Aaron and my mother Rebekha, about Uncle Chaimle and the others who remained there, in that outer, and as it seemed—already inaccessible world, to which I was hardly likely to return. And what had happened, I was wondering, to my rabbi, who, pale and frozen on the sidewalk in Lvov, followed with his eyes the movement of the departing truck? And where now were Esther Katz, Liova Weissmann, Avramchik, Pan Voitek, and the Catholic priest? Had the collective calamity that had fallen on our heads spared those whom Ben-David defined as “the System,” and had the aforementioned system, before the lethal danger that was threatening it, not let go of its iron grip and spit them out to freedom, after apologizing for the small annoying misunderstanding? Clickety-clack, clickety-clack…
It was probably long after midnight when I woke up from the silence that had suddenly fallen. Our train had halted and this wasn’t a station, and it wasn’t an intermediary stop either, with the familiar asthmatic puffing of locomotives, maneuver-directing whistles, and that secret ritual with the banging of a small hammer on the wagon wheels, which always reminds me of our old railroad worker Shmoile Abramovitch from the railroad junction of Drogobych. Excuse me for straying a little from the road taking us to the heart of the Reich, but let me tell you how good old Shmoile banged most patiently and diligently on the wagon wheels in Austro-Hungarian, Polish, and Soviet times, and when he retired they even awarded him the Medal of the Red Labor Flag. Deeply moved, Shmoile delivered the following speech:
“Dear comrades and fellow railroad workers! Thank you for all the good words that I have heard. Thank you also for the high honor of the medal for my half-century of faithful service at the Drogobych railway station with that small hammer and its long handle. But now, before I retire with my pension, please, dear comrades and colleagues, explain to me why it’s actually necessary to bang the wheels of the wagons and what’s the good of it?”
So, what I’m saying is we didn’t hear any banging or whistles. Around us, for the first time in several days, there was complete silence, as if the locomotive had taken off, leaving the rest of the train in some bottomless tunnel. Only in the morning, when gray light filtered through the vents, did they start noisily opening the sliding wagon doors and ordering us with undeserved rudeness to get out. We were surrounded by pine trees, full of bird-song. The rails ended with two buffers and a barrier of wooden crossbeams, and after the stale air in the wagons, in the first moment it seemed to me that through some misunderstanding we had ended up in German paradise: it smelled like sap and damp soil, and through the branches, high up there in the morning mist, sun rays were streaming in smoky beams, with three million gnats whirling about in a crazy dance. Such a picture would have seemed quite characteristic of peacetime and even a little like a resort if it hadn’t been for the soldiers with dogs and the whitewashed wooden planks with directions—all saying quite different things, but with two words repeated in all of them—“Streng Verboten,” which means “strictly forbidden.” The time would come when, having gotten to know my new fellow countrymen the Germans, I would understand how tenderly, one might even say voluptuously, they are devoted to that word verboten, and how that also attached streng commands respect, like the clicking of a lock or a pair of handcuffs. All signs were stamped with a deadly skull and crossbones, which evoked in me nostalgic memories of my adolescent years, spent with Captain Morgan on the Tortugas Islands. Here, of course it wasn’t about pirate flags and yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum, but about minefields and, in certain strictly defined circumstances, shooting without warning. Our coniferous surroundings consisted of very tall reddish pines, diligently trimmed almost to the tops, where their green hats darkened—as if the forest had gone through special training in the army, because here, unlike the slovenliness and waywardness of the pre-Carpathian forest, all t
he trees were equally tall, lined up in straight rows, and not even one would take a single step ahead, or stick out its belly or behind. This comforting sense of order was enhanced by the fact that each tree had military stripes cut into the bark in the form of fishbones—something like the stripes on the sleeves of our Soviet officers and political commissars from the time when they hadn’t yet restored the royal officers’ epaulettes and the “Internationale” hadn’t yet been prohibited, but that’s a whole other subject. I soon figured out that the small clay bowls at the base of each lieutenant’s or even maybe fieldmarshal’s stripes on the pine trees were collecting sap, and that we were going to produce from it—I’m trusting you with this secret—turpentine for military purposes. And if you were to look through the pine trees as they stood in ranks for a morning military inspection, you would observe in the distance the chesslike rows of orderly barracks with spots of camouflage on the roofs. You’re probably impatient to learn where we were and I’ll tell you: this place was somewhere in the Brandenburg forest and had the mysterious name “Special Site A-17.”
And here we are, brother—all mussed up and crumpled and unshaven, with bits of straw sticking to our hair, standing in two rows on the vast square plaza bordered by the green barracks. In the small space between them—something more or less like an alleyway, swept clean and marked by large black numbers—you could see the second row of barracks and even the roofs of the third. The rhythmic mechanical din drifted toward us, lathes turned, and something else that hissed somewhere behind the barracks, as if a prehistoric monster were lying around, giving an occasional snore and periodic heavy sighs, and the dusty windows of a long shed now and then gleamed with the blue lightning of welding tools.
The soldiers behind our back—in full military getup, with helmets and submachine guns, holding tight their dogs’ leather leashes—had such a militant and edgy look, as if we, the exhausted travelers to the unknown, who had let themselves be captured in the streets of Lvov, were any minute going to jump at them with knives. None of us of course had any such intention, nor did we have any knives, just the opposite—we were a little frightened, but you know yourself, the military and the police like to take situations seriously, it boosts their self-confidence. And if these fellows had had gas masks on their heads, they would have brought to mind those absurd midnight battles with ghosts in the middle of that field supposedly gassed by the French, you remember.
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