by Sam Pivnik
Before my time the last two had gone hand in hand. Alongside the great synagogue stood the great academy, the house of study built in 1859 where the devout would go every day to learn and pray. In the Jewish faith there are prayers for every minute of the day, based on the psalms of King David. When I came home from school, my father would say, ‘Sit down. We’ll say a prayer together.’ In my grandfather’s time, Reb Abram Litwik was the organiser of the tailors and he would recite psalms on their behalf in the academy – ‘Happy are those who dwell in Your house…’ He was always the last to leave.
In those days, every four-year-old boy studied in the heder, a sort of religious primary school in which they learned ‘the book’ – the teachings of the Talmud and the Torah. The learning was by rote and woe betide the boy who failed to learn. By my day, things had relaxed, partly because there were actually slightly fewer Jews in Bedzin by the Thirties and partly because of a charismatic teacher called Yoshua Rapaport. He came from Warsaw and was one of the most inspiring teachers of his generation. We take our teachers for granted, whatever our race, religion or generation. I never appreciated Mr Rapaport – he was Principal of my school and a lofty figure, someone I was even a little afraid of. He certainly didn’t suffer fools gladly but he opened up education for all of us. A keen sportsman himself, he introduced games into the curriculum as well as setting up the first orchestra in the town.
The school I went to was what today you’d call a state primary. We sang songs in the morning and had hour-long lessons, broken up into subjects like Geography and Maths, metalwork and woodwork. The language was Polish and the teachers were Christian. Katschinska was the name of my teacher in Class Three, the last time I ever sat in a classroom. We all had to wear a uniform. It was dark blue with a green stripe down the trousers and little round, green-trimmed caps. The teachers would inspect us, believing, as former generations had, that cleanliness was next to godliness. They checked our ears, our necks and made sure that our white shirt collars were stiff and starched. And we were given slippers to wear indoors, because the school was new, with central heating and floors polished like glass. You couldn’t risk outdoor boots on floors like that. I liked gardening best. No doubt the school gave it a grand name like horticulture, but it was gardening nonetheless. Each class had its own plot and we’d compete with each other, growing flowers, tomatoes and radishes. I liked the earth, the fresh air, the sun. I was less keen on blackboards and chalk, on ‘Answer this; do that!’ Of course, school was designed to make men of us, but – as it turned out – a completely different sort of institution, one unimaginable to Mr Rapaport and Miss Katschinska, would do that.
At lunchtime we’d all go home, to the courtyard at 77 in my case, perhaps taking the opportunity on the way for a little illicit football in the backstreets, what I now refer to as my ‘social functions’. My father took a keen interest in my education, testing me on what I had learned, but his real interest lay in the afternoon lessons I went to. These were Hebrew and religious classes, held not in the school or the synagogue but in private houses. There were twenty-five boys to a class and the teacher and his helper would instruct us in the mysteries of our faith. Father would test me every Saturday and if I hesitated or didn’t know, I’d feel the back of his hand or his belt.
I can see my father now – a careful, precise little man with a neatly trimmed beard. If he didn’t kick a ball around with us or play conkers, that didn’t mean he wasn’t a good father. He was. Times have changed. ‘Spare the rod and spoil the child’ was the dictum of his generation all across Europe. And I can remember sitting on the floor in wonder as he told us the great stories of Noah and the Flood; of Joshua and Jericho and all the history that had been handed down to a proud people, those chosen by God. It was my mother and Hendla who actually helped me with my homework and the only books I remember at home were religious ones.
Time and again I come back to the sad conclusion that I was just a naughty boy. I’d go to the pictures – there were three cinemas in Bedzin – and I loved cowboy films and Tarzan with Johnny Weissmuller, yodelling his way through the jungle. That was fine – perfectly acceptable behaviour – but we’d also smash windows with our football and pinch fruit from Mr Rojecki. I can remember one lady with a large, funny hat. When you’re a little boy and it is snowing and there is a lady with a funny hat … well, I’m sorry to say she became a target for our snowballs and I’m sorry for that now. I had a pair of steel-bladed skates and a group of us would chase carts (which wasn’t much of a challenge) and trams (which was downright lethal – one of us boys lost an arm doing that). More than once we were chased by the police. Who knows, today I’d probably have an ASBO!
Whenever I was caught, I’d feel my father’s belt – it was the way it was. My mother would intervene, as mothers will, trying to soften the blows. If she could have taken them for me, I’m sure she would. Whenever there was an issue – my behaviour or anything else – my father would consult the book. He had a standing in our community; people in trouble would come to him and he’d talk to them, hour after hour in the workshop as he sat cross-legged, stitching away. If he couldn’t provide an answer, if the book came up short, he’d go to see the rabbi or spend time in the stiebel, the prayer room.
There was a time – I must have been about eleven – when Hendla told us all that she wanted to go to Palestine. For centuries the Jews of the Diaspora had longed for their promised land – Canaan, that flowed, the Bible tells us, with milk and honey. That natural homeland was Palestine, then lived in by Arabs and administered by the British, still the most powerful empire-builders in the world. Young Jews and Jewesses wanted to go there to found a Jewish state and Bedzin, like all Jewish communities, had its social clubs and youth organisations, from all colours of the political rainbow and Hendla had joined one. It was called Gordonia and Nathan was a member too. They wore blue scarves with a distinctive ring, talked about Palestine and tried to learn Hebrew. There was supposed to be a period of preparation for a year before going to Palestine; this was called Hachshara. The actual emigration, which thousands of Jews had undergone by the 1930s, was Aliyah. But farming? In the desert? It made little sense to my parents who were probably afraid she’d get mixed up with Gentiles, eat treif (non-kosher food) and get herself pregnant. I didn’t understand this – I’d never seen Hendla with a boy, perhaps because I was too young to join the youth club. The bottom line was that, mystery of mysteries, Hendla didn’t play football; we just weren’t on the same wavelength! Hendla never had the chance to go to Palestine, although father pestered the rabbi about it.
So this was my childhood. Bedzin had its problems, of course. If you read the local papers from the late Thirties, it’s full of friction – punch-ups at the general assembly of the Talmud Torah; people calling each other ‘scoundrels’ and shaking their fists. There was even a fight in the precincts of the synagogue. The editorial conclusion in one edition reads ‘Let us have peace in our city.’
But I was twelve; I knew nothing of this. To me, it was all about football and the garden plot and the horse-manure smell of the courtyard of Number 77 and Mr Rojecki’s shivering little dogs and the cooing of the pigeons. Above all, it was all about that sacred ground of my mother’s people at Wodzislaw – the pines, the river, the bread, the cheese. The Garden of Eden.
* * *
But somebody else had the idea of a Garden of Eden too. He was a Bavarian ex-corporal who had joined a right-wing organisation in Germany soon after the Great War. The only problem was that he wanted to set up his Garden of Eden in somebody else’s country.
Mine.
2
The World Turned Upside Down
I don’t celebrate my birthday any more. I haven’t for a long time. Not since 1 September 1939, because that was the day the Germans invaded Poland. I don’t remember whether I got any presents – I suppose I must have done. Times were hard but mother was used to juggling the family finances and my parents would never have disappo
inted me. I remember it was a Friday, a warm day in late summer, the skies above Bedzin a cloudless blue. School had not yet opened for the autumn term – that would happen on Monday – so my friends and I were playing around in the street. Who was there? I don’t remember precisely, but it was probably Yitzhak Wesleman, Jurek and the three Gutsek boys. Somebody probably had a football. Somebody always did; but somehow, this day was different.
It wasn’t that I was thirteen – we didn’t have the word or the concept of being a teenager then. Whatever it was had nothing to do with us and yet we got caught up in it. Something was happening down at the huge army barracks near the railway station. People were heading over there, scurrying along the pavements in twos and threes, talking in murmurs, their faces serious, their eyes bright. We followed them.
I had always liked watching the soldiers, before soldiers came to mean something else to me. Our local regiment was the 23rd Light Artillery, still, like most of the army in Poland in those days, horse drawn. Us boys would watch them parading in the square, their shiny boots clattering on the cobbles, their uniforms khaki-brown with green collar patches and gleaming buttons and badges. They clashed out of town on manoeuvres from time to time, the horses hauling the painted guns and the wheels rattling over the stones.
Today, though, it didn’t seem the same. The spit and polish was gone and there was what looked to me, even as a thirteen-year-old, to be nothing but desperation and panic. We couldn’t see much beyond the fringe of onlookers. We asked some adults what was happening; why all the fuss? We’d all seen soldiers pulling out on manoeuvres before. War games. It was what soldiers did. I can remember the answer to this day. One man turned to us, looking down from his years of grim experience. He told us that the Germans had invaded. We looked at each other, uncomprehending. He tried again, saying that the war has started. Nothing. He shrugged and gave up in disgust. No doubt he muttered the cliché of every generation about the youth of today.
I suppose we stayed there until late morning, watching the comings and goings, listening to the creak of leather, the snorts and whinnies of the horses and the rattle of metal, the shouted commands. A little before midday the enormous barrack gates were thrown back and the regiment marched out. There was no band, there were no flags. Some people in the small crowd cheered, clapped and waved. The soldiers looked grim, focused, staring straight ahead.
We watched the last limber turn the corner out of the square and went back to the football we’d been playing before all this distracted us. The noise dawned on us only slowly; a distant rumble like thunder in the far-off Carpathians was getting louder. Sometimes, above our shouts or the thud of our boots on the rag ball, there were distant bangs and booms. We’d heard nothing like this before, any of us. But now we knew the war was coming to Bedzin. And nothing would ever be the same again.
* * *
We didn’t know it at the time, nor for many years to come, but the Germans had crossed the Polish border at 5.45 that morning as dawn was promising another bright day. The original date for the invasion was 25 August but they had postponed it until they were sure they were ready. Besides, they had to wait until ‘we’ attacked them. This was all a put-up job of course. At eight o’clock the day before, Polish troops had attacked a German radio station at Gleiwitz, not very far from Bedzin. Every Pole knew this was rubbish; most Germans believed it. In fact the Polish attackers were SS men in stolen uniforms and the whole fiasco was set up to make Poland look like the aggressor.
There was no declaration of war. Only civilised countries did that. The Germans called the invasion Fall Weiss – Case White – and they put fifty-three divisions into the field against us. At the time we had thirty infantry divisions with nine in reserve, eleven cavalry brigades and two motorised brigades, as well as smaller back-up units like the engineers. The Kraków Army had been created on 23 March as the main pivot of Polish defence. This was our nearest outfit, of which the Bedzin contingent was part. They had five divisions, one mounted brigade, a mountain brigade and one cavalry brigade. Their commander was Colonel Wladyslaw Powierza serving under General Antoni Szylling as divisional commander.
On that Friday at the start of what was to become known as the September campaign, I knew nothing of this but it would soon be all that adults talked about, leaving us to pick up what we could. Armies, divisions, battalions, regiments, cavalry, artillery – they were all just words; part of a world I didn’t understand. We were still kicking the ball around by mid-afternoon when we heard it: the steady drone of propeller aircraft coming from the west. We knew the Polish Air Force had a fine reputation, but we’d never seen a formation before. It took a while for your eyes to focus, to take it all in. Then we saw the wave of camouflage-painted fighter bombers, their fuselages flashing in the sun. When they reached the castle, their formation split, aircraft banking away to attack different parts of the town. Now we could see the telltale black crosses on the pale blue of their underwings. This, we would find out much later, signalled the deadly new tactic of the Germans – Blitzkrieg, the lightning war. They were hitting us from the air first. The slaughter on the ground would follow. We had no idea as the engines screamed overhead that the town of Wieluń (around a hundred kilometres away as the crow flies) had already been bombed. Three-quarters of the buildings stood as blazing wreckage; twelve hundred people were dead and most of those were civilians.
I can still remember the first resounding thump as the bombs struck home, going for the railway station with its flat roof and Art Deco facade; pounding the zinc and copper works, destroying communications and the life-blood of Bedzin. It’s funny – you don’t just hear a bomb going off, you feel it. The shock wave was like being hit in the pit of the stomach. We played on, but with less certainty than before. Black smoke formed a backdrop to the turrets of Kazimerz’s castle and the planes had gone as suddenly as they’d appeared. Eventually we all realised something terrible had happened and we thought of our families. There was only one place to be – home.
I dashed along Modzejowska and in under Mr Rojecki’s archway. My mother and Hendla were already preparing the Shabbat meal for the evening, but there was no sign of my father. I knew where he’d be – he’d be at the synagogue or the stiebel with the other elders and the rabbi. Someone would have an answer to what was happening, the gulf of total war washing over us. I was gabbling away to them both about what I had seen. I probably exaggerated it for effect, like thirteen-year-olds do. But my mother was saying nothing, just making small talk about the meal and Shabbat. I instinctively knew that my father wouldn’t be bringing back some homeless person to join us at the table, as he often did. I suspect now that he had told her not to talk to us kids about the events of the day. Years later I learned that Britain and France were both on the point of declaring war on Germany, and that the British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, had announced the war over the radio. The British may have evacuated their kids from the cities in expectation of Blitzkrieg, but we were actually seeing it and feeling it first-hand. The war was never ‘phoney’ for us.
From our windows, from the courtyard that led to father’s workshop, we could see the columns of smoke rising like chimneys straight up into the sunset that evening. We could smell the burning on the warm air – not the sweet burning wood of the Garden of Eden, but an acrid, pungent smell we didn’t know. We gathered at the table as we always did and mother lit the candles, but there was no joy in our songs. The talk was stilted, strained. After dinner we all sat listening to father reading from the book, intoning the familiar words I had known all my life. But tonight was different. Tonight gave no real promise, I know now, of tomorrow.
Saturday 2 September. Shabbat. Another warm, sun-kissed day. We would usually have made our way to the synagogue with friends and neighbours to give our thanks to God. But we didn’t go that day. And it would be twelve years before I would set foot in a synagogue again. The festivals ended. All the rituals of the Jewish year were abandoned or impossibly circu
mscribed. Nathan’s Bar Mitzvah of two years earlier had been a full-blown ceremony. Mine was held in the kitchen of our home a few weeks after the invasion, with no Torah from the synagogue, no rabbi and no cakes and coffee. That day in September was the first, in a way, of my manhood. Yesterday I had played football and waved at the soldiers. Today I saw lines of refugees, those sad, homeless, faceless ones who would clog the roads of Europe for the next six years. It was like the Exodus the rabbi and my father talked about, but there were Gentiles in the crowd too, jostling their way eastward with the Jews, all running before the advance of the Wehrmacht. Every conceivable type of transport had been utilised – the wealthy had their cars; businessmen their trucks. Others were slapping the rumps of their carthorses, straining at the hames of wagons that held their lives. Suitcases, kitbags, beds and mattresses, the odd bird in a cage, a hip bath. There was no panic, not yet. Human beings are an optimistic lot, by and large. Something would turn up. God would make it all right. But nobody was staying long in Bedzin – it was too near the front line, and chances were tomorrow it would be the front line itself.
Rumours. For the next six years my life revolved around rumours. The Germans were bombing every town in their path and machine-gunning civilians left alive. Their Stukas were dive-bombing the streams of refugees moving east. But we were not to worry – the Polish army was pushing them back over the border. All would be well.
The truth, which no one in Bedzin knew on 2 September, was that units of General Reichenau’s Tenth Army and General List’s Fourteenth Army were converging on Kraków, batting aside any opposition they faced. General von Rundstedt’s troops had already crossed the Warta River. His casualties were high – which is probably where the rumours about the Polish army pushing the Germans back came from – but his advance went on relentlessly to the east. So fast was this attack that units of our army could not liaise with each other and the reserves, around Tarnow, could not be brought quickly enough into the field.
