Isaac's Torah

by Angel Wagenstein

  We stood like this for a long time, not daring to make the slightest movement, until there opened a barrack door, above which was written “COMMANDANT,” and from the wooden veranda with three steps there rolled out a round creature in an officer’s uniform atop polished boots. Swiftly, with a rapid and narrow stride, the creature walked around the square, looking at us carefully, as if he were searching for a particular acquaintance of his. I don’t know from racial theories, or from the authentic Aryan shape of the skull, but if it’s true about the descendants of Siegfried being manly blue-eyed, blond, six-foot-six knights, then the grandmother of this nibelung had had something to do with a Hungarian Gypsy, or God forbid, with the corner grocer, Aaron Rabinovitch.

  The nibelung said, “Do you understand German, or do you need a translator?”

  An indistinct murmuring ranged up and down the line, covering the whole spectrum of nuances from “yes” and “a little bit” to “no,” which completely satisfied the boss, who continued: “I am Oberlieutenant Brückner and I am your chief. Keep in mind, this is not a concentration, but a labor camp. And you are not camp prisoners, but workers. After the blitzkrieg, which our invincible army is waging from the Atlantic to the Russian steppes and which will finish in a few months, you will go home, having fulfilled your obligation to the Reich. You will be paid for your labor, after the deduction of expenses for delousing, work clothes, food, and lodging. Discipline here is iron, remember this too, and every attempt to deviate from it will be punished as desertion or sabotage. Because it is necessary to observe the strictest military secrecy, correspondence here is forbidden. Am I clear so far?”

  So far he was clear; in his intonation one could even detect distant notes of good intentions. I don’t know if they were coming down the hereditary line from Siegfried, or from the sinful attraction of his grandmother to Hungarian Gypsies and Jewish grocers, but this is how it was and these good intentions would be confirmed more than once in the playing out of my personal destiny.

  The Oberlieutenant rolled over one more time to the motley lined-up crew, which we definitely were at that moment, then stood stock still in the center of the plaza and asked, “Is there someone who speaks good German? Who doesn’t stutter it like a Galician Jew, but knows it well, spoken and written, if you understand what I’m talking about. Is there anyone? Let him step forward!”

  I was most sincerely offended! Under the circumstances it may seem to you careless on my part, but why in the world would this hog, who was speaking in such a Saxonian dialect that his German was barely comprehensible, think that we stuttered it?! Though for the others, say the Poles and the Ukrainians, this was a language used in moderation every now and then and only in extreme need during Austro-Hungarian times, for us—even somewhat enriched by Russian blessings and, as I already told you, with some Assyrian-Babylonian additions—our Yiddish still remained in the most direct sense of the word first cousin of the German. This offended national pride of mine made me step forward—a linguistic step, so to speak, in defense of the native tongue.

  The chief came up to me, looked at me with his arms crossed behind his back and finally asked, “What’s your name?”

  I almost said “Private Isaac Blumenfeld,” but something grabbed at the coattails of my soul and I swallowed the answer, changing it in flight to “Heinrich Bjegalski, Herr Oberlieutenant!”

  He eyed me skeptically and I understood him completely: my appearance as a generally shabby wretch, a dark-skinned descendant of the Maccabees, had about as much in common with the presentable blondish Poles as my new commandant Brückner with Tannhäuser. In this respect we were equals, no doubt.

  “What was your job in Lvov?” he asked.

  “Ophthalmology,” I said.

  “Doctor?” he asked.

  “Doorman,” I said.

  “Doorman? And you studied German?” He raised his eyebrows.

  “Affirmative, sir, I’ve studied it,” I said.

  “And who, according to you, is the author of Faust?”

  “Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Herr Oberlieutenant. 1749–1832.”

  Tannhäuser was flabbergasted, and I sent up silent gratitude to my favorite teacher Eliezer Pinkus, may his soul rest in peace.

  TWO

  Some people think that the study of literature at school has no practical application and that it only fills up empty space between two recesses, which is not true at all. Eliezer Pinkus, in order to cultivate in us the need for basic knowledge about this seemingly useless subject, and also in connection with the above-mentioned patriarch of German literature, would tell us the story of Mendel the fool, who visited our capital, at the time Vienna, stopped at the monument of Goethe by the Ring, and said with indignation, “He was neither an emperor, nor a military leader, nor an anything. He only wrote The Robbers!”

  “The Robbers is not by Goethe,” someone said to him, “but by Schiller.”

  “So you see,” insisted Mendel, “he didn’t even write The Robbers and such a monument they’ve erected for him!”

  I wouldn’t say that the bits and pieces of schooltime literary reminiscences that had stuck to my memory like the fluff of sheep wool to a thorny bush were particularly helpful during my tailoring days in Kolodetz, but at this moment I really for the first time understood the applicability of literature classes to real life—an indisputable benefit, comparable for example to the knowledge gained from geometry class showing you how to calculate with old man Euclid’s help the square centimeters necessary to tailor an additional vest. In this particular case, as a result of my acquaintance with Goethe (1749–1832), I ended up not at hard labor in the camp but in the office, under the direct supervision of Boss Brückner. I don’t know if you’ve ever been in the army, prison or camp, but these are the places where most spontaneously and from the depths of popular creativity are born the nicknames of bosses, and they stick to them eternally, like a mole on the nose. In this case, an anonymous poetic soul stuck the nickname “the Radish” to our boss, thus hitting the nail on the head, because both his reddish face, and the harmonic equivalence of his height and width, brought to mind this magnificent natural product, regardless of the fact that I had never in Kolodetz come across brightly shining bald radishes in boots.

  Despite the prohibition against speaking on this topic, it’s high time I informed you what exactly was this Special Site A-17 and what in particular was special about it. It produced cartridge cases for artillery shells, shells for our egg-shaped air bombs and land mines, as well as similar half-manufactured products of the first necessity. The fresh smell of pine turpentine borne by the breeze was convincing evidence that the barrels carried out together with the ready-made products up to that silent line in the forest contained a chemical derivative of unknown purpose.

  This production from different barracks, documented in the books as workshops with certain numbers and codes, transformed itself into figures, memos, and reports, and my historic mission consisted of the mechanical entering of data in the respective columns and registers, as well as the sorting of documents arriving from the kitchen department on expended quantities of potatoes, turnips, beets, and oat flour for the feeding of about two thousand people. I told you already that neither at that time nor later could I understand why this “special site” didn’t belong, in spite of its mitigated regime, to the category simply of concentration camp, seeing as I do in my mind’s eye the pitiful shadows of predominantly Polish origin, who were lined up as early as dawn in their gray duck clothes under the clanking sounds struck on the hanging piece of rail, after which for sixteen hours a day they scratched with files, hammered, pushed wagons, carried casts for iron-casting, and did all kinds of other things till the next clanking of the rail at nine in the evening, under the sharp eye of the German machine workers. The latter were living separately and had a permit to visit the town, so they could drink beer, and I wouldn’t say that they acted rude
ly toward that evolutionary facsimile of the Egyptian slaves, they just treated them with the conscientious indifference with which the master treats the pliers, the plane, or the rasp—without compassion or tenderness, but also without malice, which as a rule the inanimate object cannot evoke.

  In the beginning I slept together with everybody else, in the sleeping barracks with two rows of wooden bunk beds, but with the development of the activity about which you’ll now learn, the commandant grew fond of me, and I was transferred to the office, where there was an iron bed to which destiny had given a modest role during the Second World War. I can’t say that I was enthusiastic about the Radish’s order to leave the common quarters, despite the indisputable comforts of a more privileged situation, because in the first several days this raised everybody’s hackles against me and filled them with suspicion regarding my readiness to commit national treason. This is how it usually is in the army, camp, or prison—people don’t like the privileged ones, and are predisposed to consider them a priori stoolpigeons and agents provocateurs, which explains the black eye I got by accident in the dark. I was genuinely suffering from the inability to explain to my comrades in fortune that I belonged to the tribe of Israel and could therefore hardly be persuaded to become a secret spy for the Nazis, even though history has noted such cases, shameful in every respect. It wasn’t easy for me either to wriggle out of that Saturday evening ritual, when my comrades in fortune had the right to wash themselves in the low brick building, conditionally called the “Bathhouse” and consisting of two parallel water pipes rigged with shower heads, from which there spouted either boiling water, capable of skinning a rhinoceros in two seconds, or ice cold double pneumonia. My excuses about unfinished office work, so I could get out of such collective hygiene activities, were related, you remember, to that little thing of mine hanging down under my belly button, and which, if you recall, had once upon a time made even the police chief lift it up with his cane and fix the thick lenses of his spectacles upon it. Because you can hide your faith or origin, but how can you hide the great deed of that servant of Yahweh’s, who had circumcised me in order to gather me into the bosom of Abraham?

  The Radish, by the way, didn’t even try to ask for spying services from me, because he turned out to be a sentimental Nazi, needing like any human being warmth and affection. This was expressed by the necessity, during the late night hours, of having to listen to his essays on loneliness and love, which soon made me reach the conclusion that Oberlieutenant Immanuel-Johannes Brückner, head of Special Site A-17, also known as the Radish—I mean the oberlieutenant, not the site—was suffering and was head over heels in love. With whom and how, I would find out later.

  The aforementioned essays would unfold in width and depth mostly after the drinking of a bottle of “Corn”—corn meaning grain, of which they made a final product, called by the same name, or, as we would term it, ordinary wheat vodka. You know that I’m not much of a drinker, but he would order me to follow him on his journey through the wet wheat, and I, despite faking that I drank more than I could in reality, would usually get drunk ahead of the boss and the two of us would weep together—each of us about something of his own. Of course, the situation was not always so romantic; the oberlieutenant would sometimes get into sudden fits of violent rage, threatening to hang all the Poles from the site as outright saboteurs and enemies of the Führer, and for punishment would leave the whole camp, including me, for two days without food. This happened mostly when the client factories would send a written complaint about cracks and bubbles in the casts, about our careless attitude toward strict standards or about ordinary sand in the residue of that derivative in the barrels, in which turpentine, produced by us, played a major role. I don’t think that all these faults undermining the prestige of Special Site A-17 and its good name were by chance, but if this was conscious sabotage, it was done so skillfully that its main author could never be discovered. These cracks and bubbles multiplied drastically at just that time when, with the next human transports, they started bringing in people from the occupied Soviet territories, but it’s not my job to comment on the problem, because this may have been on account of the low level of technological culture in Soviet Russia, as a result of which sand was found not only in the barrels but also in the lubricating oil of the machines, lathes, and cutters.

  During one such understandable fit of rage on the part of my boss and benefactor, when he tried to distract himself with a game of chess, I in a most ungrateful manner checkmated him with black pieces as early as the ninth step, which caused my fully deserved incarceration for three days. It seems that the Radish experienced my exile more painfully than myself, who was simply lying around in the dark, damp cell, built as an addition next to the bath and performing the function of a punitive institution, because as early as midnight on the second day I was taken out by the guards and delivered under the gun to the office, where the bottle of Corn was already uncorked. Following that late night of mutual contrition, I learned to lose chess games skillfully and believably and a second incarceration became unnecessary.

  My description of the camp environment would be incomplete if I didn’t tell you about senior-master Stakhovich, a lathe-worker from Lodz, dragged down to these Brandenburg woods not like us, a ragged bunch captured during a blind and accidental raid, but after a targeted search for masters in the trade. He was an expert in everything, a so-to-speak universal technical genius, who fixed the machines, electrical appliances, and motorcycles of the guards, and one time even the boss’s radio receiver. This Stakhovich, who walked with a marked limp in his left foot—a result of childhood paralysis—in his capacity as senior master had liberty of movement within the boundaries of the camp, and it is he who brought me all kinds of reports from the workshops to put in the corresponding account books.

  One time, when the boss had gone off and disappeared somewhere in Brandenburg, from whence he would return probably late at night and even more probably drunk, Stakhovich brought the documents and I invited him to sit down and treated him to a cigarette filched from the Radish. In our business relations we spoke German, he had a more or less good command of it. The Pole inhaled the smoke deeply and hungrily—cigarettes at the time were rare and expensive and the small kiosk, serving mostly German personnel, sold them individually, under the table—and I looked at his rough hands, their cracked skin covered by a thin web of unwashable grime. I was gazing at them with respect and jealousy, because those hands could do everything that I couldn’t, when suddenly he said in Polish:

  “You’re not Polish and you’re not from Lvov.”

  “That’s to say—what do you mean?” I tried to feign astonishment.

  “What I mean is, you’re a Jew, I discovered it a long time ago by some words which no kraut would use. You’re from somewhere in southern Galicia, aren’t you?”

  I was bowled over by his fine ethno-phonetic sense and after some hesitation, gave in: “It’s true.”

  “Don’t worry, no one will find out.”

  In a certain sense I was relieved, because at least in this private instance I felt I was being spared the suspicion of collaborating with the Nazis. Stakhovich looked at me intently, thought about something, and then asked, “Do you want to do me a big favor?”

  “Namely?”

  “You’re able to go out to the loading ramp; I’m not allowed. While you’re writing down the numbers of the crates and things like that, can you send my regards to the locomotive machinist? He’s German but speak to him in Polish. Tell him: ‘Best regards from Stakhovich.’ And if he gives you a package, can you bring it to me without being noticed? I warn you, it’s dangerous. Very dangerous. You can refuse if you want to.”

  My heart leaped into my mouth. “And what’s in the package?” I asked quietly.

  To my generally polite question he answered quite rudely, “It would be healthier for you if you didn’t know. Do it if you want, if you don’t—fo
rget about it, period.”

  I did it. Stakhovich neither thanked me nor in any way hinted at it afterward. But in my soul I conducted quiet evening discussions with my rabbi, for it seemed to me that I felt his presence, somewhere close to me, even that I saw him in the darkness—pale and with that glaring look of a madman or someone possessed with which he delivered the Shabbos sermon.

  “You did well,” said the rabbi, “but don’t think you’re a hero, because anyone in your place would’ve done it. Your children and my nephew Schura and niece Susannah are fighting somewhere a life-and-death battle, and do you know where my sister and your wife Sarah are, and your other son Elia, and your father Aaron, and your mother Rebekha and Chaimle and all the rest?”

  “What about Esther Katz?” I asked, not without a certain malice.

  “Esther Katz too—wherever she is, whatever happened to her, in her soul she’s with those people who are stopping the German tanks with their chests! Get it?”

  “Got it,” I said.

  “And what were you thinking—that you’ll play chess with the black pieces and pretend to be losing the game till the end of the war, while others are dying? And that the bitter cup of hardship will pass by you, because you’re the pet and the bosom buddy of the head of a Nazi camp? Shall I remind you of Joseph, from the tribe of Israel and the son of Jacob, who was brought to Egypt as a slave, became the favorite of the pharaoh, but didn’t forget his brothers? And aren’t you a slave, who became the pet of his master? True, Itzik, you’re not a wise prophet like Joseph but a complete fool; on the other hand, your Radish is not Amenhotep either! Remember your brothers, remember them. I’ve already told you who they are: all people, of all skin colors, all tongues and tribes, all lands and seas, because a mortal danger is encroaching on all of them and the seventh year of disaster is coming, and its name is fascism. Remember your brothers and be a Joseph!”